Second largest earthquake to hit Canada since 1949

Map locates a violent earthquake measuring 7.7 which jolted British Columbia’s north-central coast Saturday night, frightening residents and forcing many to temporarily leave their homes for higher ground ahead of a possible tsunami.

Photograph by: Sean Vokey , Canadian Press

VANCOUVER — The Haida Gwaii region continues to feel the aftershocks of a violent earthquake measuring 7.7 that jolted British Columbia’s north-central coast Saturday night, frightening residents and forcing many to temporarily leave their homes for higher ground ahead of a possible tsunami.

The largest, a 6.4 magnitude tremor, struck Sunday afternoon, 136 kilometers south of Masset. There have been over 40 aftershocks in the area.

Tsunami warnings were issued for the North Coast Saturday, the Haida Gwaii islands, parts of the central B.C. coast, the coast of Alaska and as far away as Hawaii.

Early Sunday morning the warnings were downgraded to advisory status, meaning evacuations were no longer necessary, and they were cancelled altogether a few hours later.

Residents near the centre of the quake said the violent jolting lasted for up to a minute, but no injuries or major damage had been reported.

Carsten Ginsburg, who lives in the small community of Bella Coola southeast of Prince Rupert, said the quake lasted about 40 seconds.

“It shook everything. The electricity went out, the power lines were swinging all over the place and stuff was falling off the shelves.”

Brent Ward, an earth scientist at Simon Fraser University, said the earthquake was the second largest to hit the country since 1949, when another earthquake was recorded in the same area with a magnitude of 8.1.

“It’s an earthquake in an area that gets a lot of earthquakes,” he said. “It’s a tectonically active area.”

Ward said the area is known as the Queen Charlotte fault, where the earth’s plates slide horizontally across each other in a strike-slip action, similar to what happens along California’s San Andreas fault.

“Stresses build up because of that movement, and every so often we get the release of that stress in the form of an earthquake.”

Ward said he wasn’t surprised the tsunami warning was shortlived because the strike-slip movement along the fault doesn’t generally trigger tsunamis.

“To trigger a tsunami you need to have a vertical movement of the sea floor, and it’s that vertical movement that displaces water and triggers the tsunami,” he said. “Because it’s sliding across each other, you’re not generally moving the water.”

In fact, hours after the earthquake, Dennis Sinnott, who works at the Institute of Ocean Sciences, said the largest wave hit Langara Island, a northern Haida Gwaii island, and measured just 69 centimetres.

The quake also set off emergency sirens across the Pacific on the islands of Hawaii, but even as people were moving to higher ground, the warning was called off.

In Alaska, the wave surge was just 10 centimetres, much smaller than officials had been forecasting.

Kelli Kryzanowski, manager of strategic initiatives Emergency Management B.C., said the initial earthquake occurred at 8:04 p.m. inland on Haida Gwaii and was initially recorded at a magnitude of 7.1 but was quickly upgraded to a magnitude of 7.7.

Kryzanowski said small waves generated by the quake, measured at 28 centimetres and 44 centimetres, also hit the northern tip of Vancouver Island.

“What we’re seeing at this time are relatively small sea-level fluctuations,” she said.

B.C. Justice Minister Shirley Bond said there appeared to be little damage from the quake.

“We’re certainly grateful at this point,” said Bond, who spoke to reporters during a late night conference call. “We’re very grateful for that, but we’ll wait until we can actually see the impact.”

After the quake, Ginsburg said he ran home as quickly as he could to see if there was a tsunami warning.

“Which of course there was,” he added.

Ginsburg owns the Float House Inn on the public wharf in Bella Coola and had about six customers celebrating a birthday party.

Cornish lives in a log house and had been told that it’s one of the safest places to be in the event of an earthquake.

But she said it sure didn’t feel safe Saturday night.

“The log house swayed and creaked and my light over my kitchen table was swaying, some chimes went off. I stood up and I could feel the undulations under my feet, to the point where I almost got nauseated.”

Geoff Ray said he has felt a lot of earthquakes, but this was the most powerful quake he’s ever experienced in the 37 years he’s lived on Haida Gwaii.

Ray operates the Breezeway Accommodations bed and breakfast in Queen Charlotte City and said the beams of his building were “visibly shaking quite a lot, there were things falling off shelves.”

“(It was) an exciting experience, there’s no doubt about that.”

Lenore Lawrence, a resident of Queen Charlotte City, said the quake was “definitely scary,” adding she wondered if “this could be the big one.”

She thought the shaking lasted more than a minute.

While several things fell off her mantle and broke, she said damage in her home was minimal.

Residents rushed out of their homes in Tofino when the tsunami sirens sounded, but they were allowed to return about two hours after the quake.

Yvette Drews, a resident of Tofino, said she ran out of her home with her two children and mother in-law and drove to a local school when she heard the community’s tsunami sirens go off.

They were told by police that they could return home.

But while on the way home, Drews said she heard the tsunami sirens go off again.

“Well that just freaked me out, hearing the siren and the voice,” she said.

The quake shook Vancouver Island, the Haida Gwaii area, Prince Rupert, Quesnel and Houston, and was even felt in Metro Vancouver and Alaska.

“It’s a good wake-up call for everyone to make sure they have an earthquake kit and a plan if an earthquake like this hits an area that they live,” said Ward.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off the west coast of Canada, but there were no reports of major damage. Residents in parts of British Columbia were evacuated, but the province appeared to escape the biggest quake in Canada since 1949 largely unscathed.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the powerful temblor hit the Queen Charlotte Islands just after 8 p.m. local time Saturday at a depth of about 3 miles (5 kilometers) and was centered 96 miles (155 kilometers) south of Masset, British Columbia. It was felt across a wide area in British Columbia, both on its Pacific islands and on the mainland.

“It looks like the damage and the risk are at a very low level,” said Shirley Bond, British Columbia’s minister responsible for emergency management said. “We’re certainly grateful.”

The National Weather Service issued a tsunami warning for coastal areas of British Columbia, southern Alaska and Hawaii, but later canceled it for the first two and downgraded it to an advisory for Hawaii.

Gerard Fryer, a senior geologist with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, said the first waves hitting shore in Hawaii were smaller than expected.

Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie said early Sunday that the Aloha State was lucky to avoid more severe surges after the powerful earthquake struck off the coast of Canada. Abercrombie said beaches and harbors are still closed statewide.

“We’re very, very grateful that we can go home tonight counting our blessings,” Abercrombie said.

The weather service also canceled a tsunami advisory for Oregon, leaving northern California as the only spot in North America still under a tsunami advisory.

Dennis Sinnott of the Canadian Institute of Ocean Science said a 69-centimeter (27 inch) wave was recorded off Langara Island on the northeast tip of Haida Gwaii, formerly called the Queen Charlotte Islands. The islands are home to about 5,000 people, many of them members of the Haida aboriginal group. Another 55 centimeter (21 inch) wave hit Winter Harbour on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island.

“It appears to be settling down,” he said. “It does not mean we won’t get another small wave coming through.”

Canada’s largest earthquake since 1700 was an 8.1 magnitude quake on August 22, 1949 off the coast of British Columbia, according to the Canadian government’s Natural Resources website. It occurred on the Queen Charlotte Fault in what the department called Canada’s equivalent of the San Andreas Fault — the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates that runs underwater along the west coast of the Haida Gwaii.

In 1970 a 7.4 magnitude quake struck south of the Haida Gwaii.

The USGS said the temblor shook the waters around British Columbia and was followed by a 5.8 magnitude aftershock after several minutes. Several other aftershocks were reported.

The quake struck 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Sandspit, British Columbia, on the Haida Gwaii archipelago. People in coastal areas were advised to move to higher ground.

Urs Thomas, operator of the Golden Spruce hotel in Port Clements said there was no warning before everything began moving inside and outside the hotel. He said it lasted about three minutes.

“It was a pretty good shock,” Thomas, 59, said. “I looked at my boat outside. It was rocking. Everything was moving. My truck was moving.”

After the initial jolt, Thomas began to check the hotel.

“The fixtures and everything were still swinging,” he said. “I had some picture frames coming down.”

Lenore Lawrence, a resident of Queen Charlotte City on the Haida Gwaii, said the quake was “definitely scary,” adding she wondered if “this could be the big one.” She said the shaking lasted more than a minute. While several things fell off her mantle and broke, she said damage in her home was minimal.

Many on the B.C. mainland said the same.

“I was sitting at my desk on my computer and everything just started to move. It was maybe 20 seconds,” said Joan Girbav, manager of Pacific Inn in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. “It’s very scary. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never felt that.”

Residents rushed out of their homes in Tofino, British Columbia on Vancouver Island when the tsunami sirens sounded, but they were allowed to return about two hours after the quake.

In Hawaii, the tsunami warning spurred residents to stock up on essentials at gas stations and grocery stores and sent tourists in beachside hotels to higher floors in their buildings. Bus service into Waikiki was cut off an hour before the first waves, and police in downtown Honolulu shut down a Halloween block party. In Kauai, three schools used as evacuation centers quickly filled to capacity.

Fryer said the largest wave in the first 45 minutes of the tsunami was measured in Maui at more than 5 feet (1.5 meters), about 2 feet (60 centimeters) higher than normal sea levels. No major damage was reported.

In Alaska, the wave or surge was recorded at 4 inches (10 centimeters), much smaller than forecast, said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. The quake was felt in Craig and other southeast Alaska communities, but Zidek said there were no immediate reports of damage.

Cars are seen on Ala Wai Blvd. in Honolulu’s Waikiki in Hawaii on Saturday before the arrival of the first tsunami waves.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

NEW: the largest wave was about 2.5 feet above ambient sea level

NEW: Tsunami advisory lifted

Hawaii evacuations are lifted

The tsunami was caused by a magnitude 7.7 earthquake in western Canada

(CNN) — A tsunami warning for Hawaii, triggered by a powerful earthquake in Canada, proved nothing more than a pre-Halloween scare for thousands of people this weekend.

“The tourists are doing their best Chicken Little impressions,” one CNN iReporter in West Maui, Hawaii, wrote early Sunday.

Sirens announced the tsunami warning across Hawaii on Saturday night, as thousands of revelers packed streets in Honolulu for the annual Hallowbaloo festival and many others in costumes headed to Halloween parties.

Restaurants, clubs and the festival immediately shut down and the parties turned into bumper-to-bumper traffic jams as residents headed to higher ground.

Visions of the devastating quake and tsunami that killed thousands in Japan in March 2011 fueled the fright, but the waves proved to be smaller and less powerful than feared.

While the warning said waves could surge between 3 and 6 feet, the largest wave, measured in Kahului on the island of Maui, was about 2.5 feet above ambient sea level, according to Gerard Fryer, senior geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

The evacuation orders for coastal residents and the tsunami warning were canceled by 1 a.m. in Hawaii (7 a.m. ET) and a tsunami advisory was put in its place. That advisory was lifted three hours later.

Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle said early Sunday that people who had evacuated could return to their homes. CNN affiliate Hawaii News Now reported that was also the case for coastal residents in various parts of the state.

Earlier, local television showed images of bumper-to-bumper traffic on roads leading from the coast to higher ground. About 80,000 people live in evacuation zones on the island of Oahu, where Honolulu is located.

MANILA, Philippines – Eight earthquakes, many of which occurred within an hour of each other, were recorded east of Burgos town in Surigao del Norte on Sunday, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said.

A 4.1-magnitude tremor which has a depth of 21 kilometers was felt in the eastern part of Burgos at 6:20 a.m.

At 9:43 a.m., a 4.8-magnitue quake was recorded 137 km east of Burgos at a 62-km depth.

The third earthquake, felt at 9:53 a.m., measured 5.3 and rattled the eastern part of Burgos.

At 10:35 a.m., a 4.5-magnitude quake hit Burgos for the fourth time. It was plotted 118 km east of Burgos with a depth of 71 km.

The fifth tremor, measured 5.5 and located 113 km east of Burgos with a depth of 85 km, occurred at 10:43 a.m.

At 11:04 a.m., a 4.9-magnitude shake was recorded 117 km east of Burgos with a depth of 125 km.

A small earthquake measuring 3.5 magnitude struck at 11:37 a.m. It was located 116 km east of the town with a depth of 62 km.

The eighth earthquake happened at 2:15 p.m. and it measured 4.2-magnitude. It was located 57 km of Burgos and has a depth of 7 km.

Eugene Tanner/AP Visitors and Oahu residents watch the ocean water surge in and out of the Ala Wai Harbor carrying various debris during a tsunami Saturday in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Petti Fong and Graham Slaughter
Staff Reporters

VANCOUVER—The second largest earthquake in Canadian history was still rattling nerves Sunday, with aftershocks off the northern coast of British Columbia.

On Saturday night, a massive 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit about 30 kilometres north of Sandspit, B.C., in the Haida Gwaii islands shortly after 8 p.m. local time, sending tremors north through the island chain and south as far as Metro Vancouver.

It was the largest earthquake to be felt in Canada since an 8.1-magnitude quake in the same region back in 1949.

A surprisingly strong 6.4-magnitude aftershock in the same area shook residents again Sunday afternoon around 2 p.m.

Earthquake expert Brent Ward from Simon Fraser University said he expects aftershocks for days ahead, but generally in the 4- to 5-magnitude range.

“We don’t really understand how to predict earthquakes enough to know if something like this could be an indicator of a larger earthquake in the same vicinity occurring in the future,” Ward said Sunday. “If we get another earthquake that’s greater than 7.7, it wouldn’t be an aftershock, it would be a new earthquake.”

Saturday’s massive quake also caused a sleepless night for a whole section of western North America, watching and waiting for a tsunami warning to pass.

Based on historical records, earthquakes in the area of Saturday evening’s rumblings don’t generally trigger tsunamis, Ward said. But he added that evacuations are a worth the effort because tsunami waves can sweep through coastal communities with devastating consequences.

Neil Goodwin, a fishing lodge manager from Sandspit, was in his living room Saturday night when the rumbling started.

“It was the kind of shaking that if you weren’t holding onto something, you’d be on the floor,” he said. “It wasn’t very violent for probably the first 10 seconds, and then it really amped up.”

As the power cut out, Goodwin, 35, used the flashlight on his cellphone to find his two dogs and escape his house. He didn’t have time to assess the damage or find his cat.

Goodwin drove to one of two hills designated as safety point in tsunami drills, where he stood with his neighbours and watched the waves grow in size and strength.

“Within 10 minutes, pretty much 90 per cent of everyone in town was in one of the two points,” he said.

In Queen Charlotte, Canadian Coast Guard Malcolm Dunderdale spent a sleepless night in the dark after the power cut out within seconds of the shaking, which he said lasted about 30 to 45 seconds.

After gathering his cellphone, mobile radios and general tsunami kits, plus blankets and pillows, Dunderdale said, there was nothing to do but wait.

The first tsunami reached the West Coast at Langara Island, part of Haida Gwaii, at 9:16 p.m., about an hour and a half after the earthquake struck. But the waves caused no damage.

The earthquake also triggered tsunami warnings in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California and Hawaii. The last of the tsunami advisories were lifted Sunday morning.

The biggest waves — about 1.5 metres high — appeared to hit Maui, the Associated Press reported. There were no immediate reports of damage, though one person died in a fatal crash near a road that was closed because of the threat near Oahu’s north shore.

Buildings shook in downtown Los Angeles, but no damages or injuries were reported.UPI reported that the first quake hit at 12:47 a.m., beginning from a depth of 11 miles. Its epicenter was 66 miles north of San Diego.

The next one occurred at 8:24 a.m., with the epicenter five miles east of Santa Clarita, 24 miles north of Los Angeles.

California was struck by a 3.5 magnitude earthquake a week earlier. It occurred at 1:40 p.m. near the city of Blue Lake, which is over 200 miles east of Sacramento.

Sunday’s quake occurred three hours after a 7.7 magnitude tremor hit the west coast of Canada, which led to a brief tsunami warning in Hawaii.

Tiffany Renee Daniel responded, “I’m in Southaven and I swear I just felt something too I was just sitting here trying to explain it away.”

Love lives in a fourth-story apartment and said she could hear a low rumbling and felt her couch shake. She said her parents, who are in the Bartlett/Arlington area, did not feel anything.

But Kevin Thompson did at his home in the Rivercrest neighborhood in north Bartlett.

“My wife and I had been awake and talking for a while. We felt an initial boom-rumble, and then the bed was shaking a little. We concluded that it was the kids pounding on the floor upstairs, but we thought it was weird because we had never felt the bed shake like that before,” he said. “A few minutes later, we saw that some of our friends on Facebook talking about the earthquake. That’s when the shaking started to make more sense.”

That experience was similar to what was reported by many residents of the Memphis area.

“A little after 7:30 this morning I felt my house shake and heard a rumbling noise! I thought it was my imagination! Felt better when I heard it really was an earthquake,” said Stacey Alpert of Cordova.

Kevin O’Brien lives just south of Olive Branch. When he felt the tremors Monday morning, at first he thought his cat was somehow shaking the couch.

“It seemed a bit too strong a shake for our smallish cat and my suspicion quickly shifted to earthquake when I saw the Halloween decoration hanging from the dinette light fixture swinging,” he said. “Still, I looked outdoors to confirm that the cat had not snuck into the house.”

VIJAYAWADA: Panic spread across several villages in five districts in the state due to mild tremors on Monday. People ran out of their houses when the earth shook for a few seconds. Though no casualties were reported from any of the districts, there was panic in many places in Krishna, Guntur, Prakasam, Nalgonda, and Khammam.

There were reports of tremors even at Hayathnagar in Rangareddy district around the same time. The earth quake monitoring centre at Vijayawada termed the incident as ‘very minor’ and said there was nothing to worry about. “It’s common to experience such tremors when the rocky layers of earth make adjustments within themselves,” said RDO S Venkata Rao.

Volcanic Activity

The earthquake swarm in the Tjörnes Fracture Zone north off Iceland continues into its 10th day. After a decline in intensity during 25-28 Oct, the frequency of quakes has again picked up. There are often more than 100 quakes a day including some above magnitude 3. The Icelandic Met Office maintains a warning for a possible larger quake in the area.

Extreme Temperatures/ Weather

Cold snap hits France with first signs of winter

http://www.euronews.com/ “C’est l’hiver avant l’heure;” or ‘it is winter before it should be’, was one local person’s reaction to heavy snow falls which have hit eastern parts of France.

The cold snap brought power cuts with up to 50,000 households in the Isere region in the Alps deprived of electricity.

Authorities have issued an “Orange” warning, the second highest alert, and rescue services have been fully mobilised.

Up to 50 centimetres of snow fell in some parts making driving hazardous. An icy wind and fresh falls of snow on top of the ice only added to the dangerous conditions.

Many drivers were forced to abandon their cars while emergency services were called to clear trees from roads felled in the high winds, with gusts blowing up to 130 kilometres per hour recorded in one area.

Parts of the south of France were the worst hit by the high winds where on the riviera two people have been reported missing.

A search has been mounted for a 12-year-old boy on the island of Porquerolles. Emergency services say his bike has been found. A 26-year-old windsurfer is also missing.

In the port of Marseille the ferry Napoleon Bonaparte was damaged when strong winds broke the ship’s moorings.

The hull smashed against the dock flooding two of its watertight compartments.

Beijing — China’s central and eastern regions will experience temperature drops in coming days, while the southern parts will receive moderate to heavy rain, the national meteorological watchdog forecast Sunday.

Strong wind will make temperatures in northeastern regions fall by six to ten degrees Celsius on Sunday. A blast of cold air is forecast to sweep across the central and eastern parts from Monday, the National Meteorological Center said on its website.

The center also forecast that fog will shroud parts of Hubei, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces on Sunday morning, reducing visibility to less than 1,000 meters.

Over the next three days, parts of South China will see moderate to heavy rain, and some regions may experience torrential rain, the center said.

Son-Tinh, the 23rd tropical storm of the year, strengthened to a super-typhoon on Saturday night and was located 260 km southeast of Vietnam’s Thanh Hoa at 5 a.m. Sunday.

Son-Tinh is expected to move northwestward at a speed of 10 to 15 km per hour and make landfall in Vietnam’s northern coastal regions on Sunday night, the center said.

Only twice before since records began has there been snow in October in all the nine provinces of Austria, on the 31 October 1941 as well as in the night of 23 and 24 October 2003.

Austrian weather expert Alexander Orlik from the central weather institute ZAMG said: “It is true the snow is very early this year and that is an indication that it will be a long hard winter, but not proof.”

The early snow caught many drivers unaware who had not yet changed over to winter tyres – causing problems on the roads. The legal deadline to have winter tyres is 1 November in Austria.

In Carinthia parts of the region were left without electricity as the snow fell as a result of heavy snow meaning trees toppled onto the lines .

Parts of West Virginia were digging out from up to three feet of snow dumped in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a deluge that cut power to hundreds of thousands of residents and shut down main highways.

The thick blanket of snow at higher elevations across the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, including in parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania, also brought concerns that rivers and creeks in low-lying areas could flood later in the week as the snow melts, with temperatures expected to reach 60 degrees. Falling trees and storm-related traffic accidents claimed the lives of three people in Maryland, three in Pennsylvania and one in West Virginia, state officials said Tuesday.

Close to 300,000 West Virginia residents were without power Tuesday afternoon, as high winds and heavy snow snapped branches and downed power lines, and officials expected the number to rise. Outages at several utilities had left some areas without access to water, and officials were sending out trucks to deliver bottled water.

“West Virginia continues to be hard hit,” said Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat. “Right now, my main focus is on life safety, power restoration and critical infrastructure.…We are doing everything we can to help the folks in need.”

More than 30 of West Virginia’s 55 counties had snow, with the heaviest snowfall at higher elevations, said Liz Sommerville, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Charleston, W.Va. Bowden, above 3,000 feet, recorded 24 inches by early Tuesday, compared with 16 inches in Beckley, elevation 2,300 feet, and 9 inches in the capital of Charleston, elevation 980 feet.

“Trees are coming down. I got a feeling that a lot of weaker structures are going to come down,” said Gary Berti, of Davis, W.Va., where 30 inches of snow had fallen by Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Berti, 54 years old, said all the stores along the main street of Davis were closed Tuesday and only pickup trucks with four-wheel drive were braving secondary roads. Restaurants without power were making food for rescue workers using gas stoves, he said: “They’re cooking everything they’ve got because they know they’re going to lose it.”

Snow was expected to keep falling on mountainous areas through Wednesday, and blizzard warnings remained in effect in more than a dozen counties Tuesday. At lower elevations, snow was expected to turn to rain by Tuesday night.

The West Virginia Department of Transportation reported accidents on three major highways in the state and said fallen trees and power lines were complicating efforts to clear roads. The agency urged residents to stay home. Marshall University canceled classes at various campuses around the state, and West Virginia State University closed for the day.

Western Maryland recorded two feet of snow, and blizzard warnings remained in effect Tuesday. While eastern areas of the state endured some flooding, officials were bracing for worse, said Ed McDonough, a spokesman for the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. More than 300,000 people in the state were without power Tuesday, with many outages in the Baltimore area. About 50 people were evacuated late Monday from the town of Crisfield, which sits on the Chesapeake Bay, after floodwaters spilled into homes.

In Pennsylvania, 1.25 million residents remained without power Tuesday. Gov. Tom Corbett warned that the central part of the state could see minor flooding, but far less than what storms last year brought to the region. The highest point in the state, Mount Davis, received 9 inches of snow, with several more inches expected. There is “nothing of major significance at this point in time that we have great concern about,” Gov. Corbett said at a midday news briefing.

Pennsylvania officials planned to have a shelter open in West Chester, Pa., to house 1,300 people from New Jersey, and another in East Stroudsburg, Pa., to aid 500 people displaced in New York. In addition, Pennsylvania officials were providing 35 ambulances and a large vehicle to transport people, as well as providing a rescue team requested by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to New Jersey.

Strong winds swept ash from the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century into the atmosphere Tuesday, creating a haze over Alaska’s Kodiak Island and prompting the National Weather Service to issue flight warnings for the area. Powerful northwest winds funneled through the mountains at the Katmai Bay, sending ash around 4,000 feet into the sky southeast toward Kodiak. Brian Hagenbuch, general meteorologist at the National Weather Service Anchorage office, was the first to spot the ash. “When the sun came up yesterday, I noticed it looked foggy on the Larson Bay camera,” one of many cameras set up by the FAA to monitor weather conditions. But as the sun continued to rise, he noted the fog looked smoggy and brown. Around 10 a.m., Hagenbuch checked the visible satellite and found a “milky, dome-shaped plume.” He then double-checked on infra-red equipment that is used specifically to spot ash even through cloud cover, which verified his findings. Having confirmed his suspicions, Hagenbuch put together a “Significant Meterological Event” warning, called a SIGMET, to alert pilots of the hazardous conditions in the area. Hagenbuch says that very strong winds “from time to time” will stir up the ash from Novarupta. The Novarupta volcanic eruption of June 6, 1912, occurred in what is now the Katmai National Park and Preserve. For three days, the volcano spewed 100 times more material than the Mount St. Helens eruption, shooting plumes 20 miles into the air and burying the valley downwind in over 500 feet of ash and volcanic rock. Four years later, when botanist Robert Griggs visited the valley, steam still poured from vents across the valley, prompting the crew to name it The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Hagenbuch will update, and possibly cancel, the SIGMET on the National Weather Service’s website Wednesday. Hagenbuch notes that there is “much less” ash in the air than Tuesday.

Washington – One crew member has died and the captain is missing in high seas and raging winds after the Canadian-built replica of HMS Bounty was abandoned and sank Monday morning.

U.S. Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopters rescued 14 others from life rafts in a dramatic dawn rescue about 150 kilometres off Cape Hatteras, N.C.

As the crew abandoned the sinking ship, struggling to get into life rafts before dawn, three were tossed into the sea by waves sweeping over the stricken vessel. “One of those managed to get to a raft, but not the other two,” U.S. Coast Guard spokesman Lieutenant-Commander Jamie Frederick told The Globe and Mail at 13:30 pm.

The dead crew member, 42-year-old Claudene Christian, was found unresponsive in the water on Monday evening. The Coast Guard said she was taken to a hospital in Elizabeth City, where she was later pronounced dead.

Rescuers continued to search for the missing captain of HMS Bounty, 63-year-old Robin Walbridge.

The Coast Guard says Captain Walbridge and Ms. Christian were able to put on survival suits designed to keep them afloat and protect them from chilly waters for 15 hours.

Helicopters were used in the search and two Coast Guard cutters have also gone out to sea to help search.

“We’re throwing all the assets we have out there so that we can keep searching for these folks,” Cdmr Frederick said.

Port-au-Prince – As Hurricane Sandy barreled toward the U.S. East Coast on Monday, the full extent of the storm’s havoc on Haiti was just beginning to emerge.

Extensive damage to crops throughout the southern third of the country, as well as the high potential for a spike in cases of cholera and other water-borne diseases, could mean Haiti will see the deadliest effects of Sandy in the coming days and weeks.

Haiti reported the highest death toll in the Caribbean, as swollen rivers and landslides claimed at least 52 lives, according to the country’s Civil Protection office. More than three days of constant rain left roads and bridges heavily damaged, cutting off access to several towns and a key border crossing with the Dominican Republic.

“The economy took a huge hit,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told Reuters. He also said Sandy’s impact was devastating, “even by international standards,” adding that Haiti was planning an appeal for emergency aid.

“Most of the agricultural crops that were left from Hurricane Isaac were destroyed during Sandy,” he said, “so food security will be an issue.”

Sandy also destroyed banana crops in eastern Jamaica as well as decimating the coffee crop in eastern Cuba.

But the widespread loss of crops and supplies in the south, both for commercial growers and subsistence farmers, is what has Haitian authorities and aid organizations had worried about most.

The past several months have seen a series of nationwide protests and general strikes over the rising cost of living. Even before Hurricane Sandy hit, residents complained that food prices were too high.

A rise in food prices in Haiti triggered violent demonstrations and political instability in April 2008. Jean Debalio Jean-Jacques, the Ministry of Agriculture’s director for the southern department, said he worried that the massive crop loss “could aggravate the situation.”

“The storm took everything away,” said Jean-Jacques. “Everything the peasants had in reserve – corn, tubers – all of it was devastated. Some people had already prepared their fields for winter crops and those were devastated.”

In Abricots on Haiti’s southwestern tip, the community was still recovering from the effects of 2010’s Hurricane Tomas and a recent dry spell when Sandy hit.

“We’ll have famine in the coming days,” said Abricots Mayor Kechner Toussaint. “It’s an agricultural disaster.”

The main staples of the local diet, bananas and breadfruit, were ripped out by winds and ruined by heavy rains.

In the southwestern Grand Anse department, a boat that regularly comes from Port-au-Prince to deliver supplies and pick up produce to sell in the capital had not come in more than a week because of the storm. The cost of basic things, like fuel, had already jumped.

In Camp-Perrin, a mountainous region in the southwest peninsula where Sandy’s first fatality was recorded after a woman tried to cross a swollen river, coffee planters lamented the loss of a harvest they were weeks away from collecting.

“Coffee is the bank account of the peasants,” said Maurice Jean-Louis, a planter and head of a coffee growers’ cooperative in Camp-Perrin. Rain flooded many storage areas as well, soaking coffee beans that were set aside for export. He called the damage “incalculable.”

Cholera in the Capital

In the capital, Port-au-Prince, Sandy destroyed concrete homes and tent camps alike, where 370,000 victims of the 2010 earthquake are still living. Haitian authorities said 18,000 families were left homeless in the disaster.

Aid organizations began reporting a sharp rise in suspected cholera cases in several departments, with at least 86 new cases alone coming from Port-au-Prince’s earthquake survivor camps, according to Dr. Juan Carlos Gustavo Alonso of the Pan American Health Organization. Many communities are still cut off and only accessible by helicopter, he said, so the broader rise in cholera was “still too early to tell.”

Since October 2010, a cholera outbreak has sickened almost 600,000 people and killed more than 7,400 in Haiti.

Both the Haitian state and international aid organizations distributed food, water and other items to affected camps and communities throughout the weekend, including personal distributions by President Michel Martelly.

“These stocks are running dangerously low,” said George Ngwa, spokesman for OCHA, a humanitarian coordinating body in Haiti. “After Tropical Storm Isaac in August, these stocks have not been replenished. What we’re doing is scraping the bottom.”

Boats sit in the Beilun River, which separates China and Vietnam, on Tuesday, October 30. Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was moving northeast along the northern Vietnamese coast on Monday after tearing the roofs off hundreds of houses and breaching flood defenses overnight, the state-run Vietnam News Agency reported.

A Chinese soldier hands over a Vietnamese baby he rescued from the flood to his mother at a waterlogged market near the China-Vietnam on Monday.

A man stands on a flooded road in Sanya, China, on Sunday, October 28.

An uprooted tree crushes a car in China on Sunday.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

More than a thousand rescue workers have been deployed in Vietnam

Helicopters are on standby to search for an oil rig adrift from its towboats

Tropical Storm Son-Tinh had already killed at least 27 people in the Philippines

Hong Kong (CNN) — As Hurricane Sandy lashes the East Coast of the United States with wind and rain, Southeast Asia is dealing with the trail of death and damage from a powerful storm that has killed at least 30 people in the region over the past few days.

Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was moving northeast along the northern Vietnamese coast on Monday after tearing the roofs off hundreds of houses and breaching flood defenses overnight, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Son-Tinh was at typhoon level when it thumped into northern Vietnam late Sunday with winds as strong as 133 kilometers per hour (83 mph). It left three people dead and two injured, according to an initial estimate from the Office of the National Search and Rescue Committee reported by (VNA).

More than a 1,300 rescue workers and soldiers have been deployed to work with local authorities on search and rescue efforts in the aftermath of the storm, VNA said.

Helicopters were on standby for a search and rescue mission for an oil rig with 35 people on board that became disconnected from its towboats miles out at sea amid strong waves generated by the storm, according to VNA.

And five people were missing Sunday after winds from Son-Tinh sank an engineering vessel near a cargo terminal in Sanya, a city on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, China’s state-run news agency Xinhua reported.

Son-Tinh is expected to gradually weaken over the course of Monday, regional weather agencies said. At least 260,000 people in Vietnam had been relocated to safer areas as it approached Sunday.

The storm had already killed 27 people when it swept across the central Philippines during the second half of last week, causing flash floods and landslides, according to the Philippine National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council. Nine people remain missing, the council said Monday.

East Asia is buffeted for several months a year by heavy storms that roll in from the western Pacific Ocean. In August, a big typhoon, named Bolaven, killed more than 60 people on the Korean peninsula.

Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.

Frank Franklin Ii/Associated Press

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Charles Sykes/Associated Press

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

The mammoth and merciless storm made landfall near Atlantic City around 8 p.m., with maximum sustained winds of about 80 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center said. That was shortly after the center had reclassified the storm as a post-tropical cyclone, a scientific renaming that had no bearing on the powerful winds, driving rains and life-threatening storm surge expected to accompany its push onto land.

The storm had unexpectedly picked up speed as it roared over the Atlantic Ocean on a slate-gray day and went on to paralyze life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with extensive evacuations that turned shorefront neighborhoods into ghost towns. Even the superintendent of the Statue of Liberty left to ride out the storm at his mother’s house in New Jersey; he said the statue itself was “high and dry,” but his house in the shadow of the torch was not.

The wind-driven rain lashed sea walls and protective barriers in places like Atlantic City, where the Boardwalk was damaged as water forced its way inland. Foam was spitting, and the sand gave in to the waves along the beach at Sandy Hook, N.J., at the entrance to New York Harbor. Water was thigh-high on the streets in Sea Bright, N.J., a three-mile sand-sliver of a town where the ocean joined the Shrewsbury River.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen,” said David Arnold, watching the storm from his longtime home in Long Branch, N.J. “The ocean is in the road, there are trees down everywhere. I’ve never seen it this bad.”

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said late Monday night that at least five deaths in the state were attributable to the storm. At least three of those involved falling trees. About 7 p.m., a tree fell on a house in Queens, killing a 30-year-old man, the city police said. About the same time, two boys, ages 11 and 13, were killed in North Salem in Westchester County, when a tree fell on the house they were in, according to the State Police.

In Morris County, N.J., a man and a woman were killed when a tree fell on their car Monday evening, The Associated Press reported.

In Manhattan, NYU Langone Medical Center’s backup power system failed Monday evening, forcing the evacuation of patients to other facilities.

In a Queens beach community, nearly 200 firefighters were battling a huge blaze early on Tuesday morning that tore through more than 50 tightly-packed homes in an area where heavy flooding slowed responders.

Earlier, a construction crane atop one of the tallest buildings in the city came loose and dangled 80 stories over West 57th Street, across the street from Carnegie Hall.

Soon power was going out and water was rushing in. Waves topped the sea wall in the financial district in Manhattan, sending cars floating downstream. West Street, along the western edge of Lower Manhattan, looked like a river. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, known officially as the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel in memory of a former governor, flooded “from end to end,” the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said, hours after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York ordered it closed to traffic.Officials said water also seeped into seven subway tunnels under the East River.

Joseph J. Lhota, the transit authority chairman, called the storm the most devastating disaster in the 108-year history of the subway system.

“We could be fishing out our windows tomorrow,” said Garnett Wilcher, a barber who lives in the Hammells Houses, a block from the ocean in the Rockaways in Queens. Still, he said he felt safe at home. Pointing to neighboring apartment houses in the city-run housing project, he said, “We got these buildings for jetties.”

Hurricane-force winds extended up to 175 miles from the center of the storm; tropical-storm-force winds spread out 485 miles from the center. Forecasters said tropical-storm-force winds could stretch all the way north to Canada and all the way west to the Great Lakes. Snow was expected in some states.

Businesses and schools were closed; roads, bridges and tunnels were closed; and more than 13,000 airline flights were canceled. Even the Erie Canal was shut down.

Subways were shut down from Boston to Washington, as were Amtrak and the commuter rail lines. About 1,000 flights were canceled at each of the three major airports in the New York City area. Philadelphia International Airport had 1,200 canceled flights, according to FlightAware, a data provider in Houston. And late Monday night, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said cabs had been instructed to get off New York City roads.

A replica of the H.M.S. Bounty, a tall ship built for the 1962 movie “Mutiny on the Bounty” starring Marlon Brando and used in the recent “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, sank off the North Carolina coast. The Coast Guard said the 180-foot three-masted ship went down near the Outer Banks after being battered by 18-foot-high seas and thrashed by 40-m.p.h. winds. The body of one crew member, Claudene Christian, 42, was recovered. Another crew member remained missing.

Delaware banned cars and trucks from state roadways for other than “essential personnel.”

“The most important thing right now is for people to use common sense,” Gov. Jack Markell said. “We didn’t want people out on the road going to work and not being able to get home again.”

By early evening, the storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes, stores and office buildings. Consolidated Edison said that as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, 634,000 customers in New York City and Westchester County were without power. Con Edison, fearing damage to its electrical equipment, shut down power pre-emptively in sections of Lower Manhattan on Monday evening, and then, at 8:30 p.m., an unplanned failure, probably caused by flooding in substations, knocked out power to most of Manhattan below Midtown, about 250,000 customers. Later, an explosion at a Con Ed substation on East 14th Street knocked out power to another 250,000 customers.

In New Jersey, more than two million customers were without power as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, and in Connecticut nearly 500,000.

President Obama, who returned to the White House and met with top advisers, said Monday that the storm would disrupt the rhythms of daily life in the states it hit. “Transportation is going to be tied up for a long time,” he said, adding that besides flooding, there would probably be widespread power failures. He said utility companies had lined up crews to begin making repairs. But he cautioned that it could be slow going.

“The fact is, a lot of these emergency crews are not going to get into position to start restoring power until some of these winds die down,” the president said. He added, “That may take several days.”

Forecasters attributed the power of the storm to a convergence of weather systems. As the hurricane swirled north in the Atlantic and then pivoted toward land, a wintry storm was heading toward it from the west, and cold air was blowing south from the Arctic. The hurricane left more than 60 people dead in the Caribbean before it began crawling toward the Northeast.

“The days ahead are going to be very difficult, Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland said. “There will be people who die and are killed in this storm,” he said.

Alex Sosnowski, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, said potentially damaging winds would continue on Tuesday from Illinois to the Carolinas — and as far north as Maine — as the storm barreled toward the eastern Great Lakes.

Mr. Cuomo, who ordered many of the most heavily used bridges and tunnels in New York City closed, warned that the surge from Hurricane Sandy could go two feet higher than that associated with Tropical Storm Irene last year. The PATH system, buses and the Staten Island Ferry system were also suspended.

Mr. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has said he expected to restore at least some service about 12 hours after the storm ended. But possible flooding within the subway system could prevent a full-scale reopening.

The storm headed toward land with weather that was episodic: a strong gust of wind one minute, then mist. More wind. Thin sheets of rain dancing down the street. Then, for a moment, nothing. The sky lightened. Then another blast of rain. Then more wind.

The day brought a giddiness to schoolchildren who had the day off and to grown-ups who were fascinated by the rough, rising water. Some went surfing, discounting the danger. Felquin Piedra, 38, rode his Jet Ski from Queens to Lower Manhattan.

“I love the waves,” Mr. Piedra yelled from New York Harbor. “The water is warm. I’ve jumped in several times.”

But even when landfall was still hours away, there was no holding back the advance guard of the storm — fast-moving bands of rain and punishing winds.

It added up to devastation. Driving through places like Pompton Plains, N.J., late Monday afternoon was like an X-Games contest for drivers. They had to do tree-limb slaloms on side streets and gunned their engines anxiously as they passed wind funnels of leaves swirling on highways.

On City Island, off the Bronx mainland, Cheryl Brinker sprayed “Sandy Stay Away” on her boarded-up art studio, expanding a collage she started during Tropical Storm Irene last year. But by midafternoon, nearby Ditmars Street was under as much as five feet of water and Steve Van Wickler said the water had cracked the cement in his cellar. “It’s like a little river running in my basement,” he said. “There are cracks and leaks everywhere.”

In some places, caravans of power-company trucks traveled largely empty roads; Public Service Electric and Gas said that 600 line workers and 526 tree workers had arrived from across the country, but could not start the repairs and cleanup until the wind had subsided, perhaps not until Wednesday.

They will see a landscape that, in many places, was remade by the storm. In Montauk, at the end of Long Island, a 50-seat restaurant broke in half. Half of the building floated away and broke into pieces on the beach.

The 110-foot-tall lighthouse at Montauk Point — the oldest in the state, opened in 1796 — shuddered in the storm despite walls that are six feet thick at the base. The lighthouse keeper, Marge Winski, said she had never felt anything like that in 26 years on the job.

“I went up in tower and it was vibrating, it was shaking,” she said. “I got out of it real quick. I’ve been here through hurricanes, and nor’easters, but nothing this bad.”

With at least 50 people dead, transit crippled in New York City and millions of people along the U.S. East Coast struggling without electricity, communities face a daunting challenge of repairing the damage wrought by superstorm Sandy.

In New York, where 18 people were killed, Mayor Michael Bloomberg surveyed the destruction in the hardest-hit neighbourhoods Tuesday. He said he saw homes so utterly destroyed only “chimneys and foundations” were left.

But despite the daunting challenge of recovery efforts, Bloomberg said “New Yorkers are resilient.”

About a third of New York’s fleet of taxis were operating Tuesday, bus service was partially restored, and the New York Stock Exchange was expected to reopen Wednesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama declared New York and Long Island a “major” disaster area.

The declaration means federal funding is now available to residents of the hardest-hit areas, who awoke to a tragic aftermath of the deadly storm that slammed ashore in New Jersey on Monday evening.

New York had seen a four-metre surge of seawater crash ashore overnight, inundating the city’s tunnels and electrical systems and causing massive damage to the city’s famed subway. The storm left New York with no running trains, a vacated business district and entire neighbourhoods under water.

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the subway system, which remains closed, had suffered the worst damage in its 108-year history.

As of midday Tuesday, Sandy’s sustained winds were already diminishing from the 130 km/h it was packing at landfall near Atlantic City, N.J. on Monday evening.

But forecasters warn the storm system will continue to affect a region stretching from the U.S. eastern seaboard north to Canada, and as far west as Wisconsin and Illinois, as it churns across Pennsylvania before veering into western New York state sometime Wednesday.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gave a bleak update at a morning news conference Tuesday, saying seaside rail lines were washed away, and there was no safe place on the state’s barrier islands for him as large parts of the coast are still under water.

“We are in the midst of urban search and rescue. Our teams are moving as fast as they can,” Christie said. “The devastation on the Jersey Shore is some of the worst we’ve ever seen. The cost of the storm is incalculable at this point.”

The effects aren’t contained to America’s largest city. More than 7.4 million homes and businesses in an area that stretches from the Carolinas in the south to Ohio in the northeast are without power Tuesday. Tens of thousands were also without electricity in southern parts of Ontario and Quebec too, as Sandy carries its combination of rain and wind northwards.

In Canada, a Toronto woman was killed Monday evening after she was struck by a falling sign blown down in the powerful storm’s high winds.

Most of the Sandy-related wind warnings issued by Environment Canada have been called off however, except for the Sarnia region, areas along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec and Inverness County in Nova Scotia.

The storm was officially downgraded from hurricane status, but it came ashore packing a lot of energy due to its unusually low barometric pressure. Combined with a cold-weather system from the north, and the high tide of the full moon, the storm is forecast to continue wreaking havoc across a 1,300-kilometre region that’s home to 50 million people through Wednesday.

Forecasters are even warning as much as one metre of snow could fall in some states, some of which has already fallen in West Virginia and other higher ground inland.

Notable effects of post-tropical storm Sandy:

U.S. death toll so far is 50, including 18 people in New York, and numerous others killed in a total of seven states.

In Canada, one woman is dead after she was struck by debris from a wind-blown sign in the west-end of Toronto Monday evening.

Sandy had already been blamed for 69 deaths when it tore through the Caribbean.

Concerns during the peak of the storm prompted shutdowns at two nuclear plants in New York and New Jersey, as well as an alert at America’s oldest nuclear plant at Barneget Bay, N.J.

200 patients, including those on respirators and babies in intensive care, evacuated after New York University’s Tisch Hospital lost power.

Fire destroyed at least 50 homes in the Breezy Point section of Queens.

Four unoccupied row houses in Baltimore collapsed in the storm.

Wind gusts of more than 100 km/h prompted the closure of the port in Portland, Maine.

Flooding in areas from Virginia to Atlantic City, where the storm washed away a 15-metre section of the famous boardwalk. New York City’s now-flooded subway remains shut.

The Holland Tunnel connecting New York to New Jersey is closed, as is a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is also barricaded due to high winds.

More than 12,000 commercial flights are cancelled, with more expected. New York’s LaGuardia, Newark Liberty and Kennedy airports are all closed.

One crew member of the Canadian-built HMS Bounty sunk in storm-battered seas off North Carolina was found and later pronounced dead. 14 others rescued alive, but the captain is still missing.

An estimated 360,000 residents of 30 Connecticut communities were under mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders.

While it could take days to determine the extent of the storm damage, early estimates peg the potential price tag anywhere between $10 billion and $20 billion, which could make it one of the costliest storms in U.S. history.

Ahead of Sandy making landfall Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama declared states of emergency in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

“Please listen to what your state and local officials are saying,” Obama said from the White House. “When they tell you to evacuate, you need to evacuate. Don’t delay, don’t pause, don’t question the instructions that are being given, because this is a powerful storm.”

On the U.S. presidential election front, both Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney suspended campaigning Monday, with just a week left before voting day.

A bird’s eye view of Marina beach in Chennai on Wednesday. Nilam evoked fears of large-scale destruction among the people in coastal districts in north Tamil Nadu. Photo: PTI

The Hindu An aerial view of the cyclone Nilam ravaged Marina on Wednesday evening. Schools, colleges and other educational establishments have announced holiday for the third day on Thursday. Photo: S.R. Raghunathan

The Hindu A man takes cover from gusty winds at Anna Salai in Chennai on Wednesday. Photo: M. Vedhan

Cyclonic storm Nilam, which threatened to hit the Chennai coast, spared the city, but made landfall near Mamallapuram, about 60 km south of Chennai, on Wednesday evening.

Four persons were reported to have died during the day in different parts of the State, but a Revenue department official clarified that Kancheepuram district, where the storm crossed the coast between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., did not report even a single death.

Nilam evoked fears of large-scale destruction among the people in coastal districts in north Tamil Nadu.

The exact details about the landfall would be known on Thursday after an assessment by the Meteorological Department, according to Y.E.A. Raj, Deputy Director General of Meteorology.

Though many areas in the northern belt received heavy rainfall on Tuesday night, the intensity was not much during the day when Nilam made the last leg of its journey. According to a bulletin issued on the basis of observations at 8-30 a.m., the storm lay centred about 260 km south southeast of Chennai, and by 6 p.m, it made landfall.

At the time of crossing the coast, Chennai recorded the maximum wind speed of 75 km per hour and Kalpakkam 65 km per hour. Hereafter, it was expected to weaken rapidly after making northwestward movement.

A holiday has been declared for schools and colleges in all coastal districts, including Chennai, on Thursday.

A tropical storm slammed into southern India, bringing heavy rain and a storm surge flooding low-lying areas and displacing more than 100,000 people. Just before the storm made landfall Wednesday, an oil tanker with 37 crew ran aground off Chennai. One of its lifeboats capsized in the choppy waters, and one crewmember drowned, the Press Trust of India news agency reported. Coast guard officers were searching for the lifeboat’s six other occupants. Andhra Pradesh state said two people died there when their homes collapsed due to heavy rain Wednesday night in Nellore and Chittoor districts, and PTI reported another death in Tamil Nadu state, a 46-year old man who slipped into the rough sea from a pier and drowned. Sri Lanka reported two deaths earlier from the cyclone. The storm from the Bay of Bengal had maximum winds of 75 kilometers (45 miles) per hour after landfall but was weakening. A storm surge of up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) was expected to flood low-lying coastal areas, the India Meteorological Department said. Heavy to very heavy rain was forecast for Thursday, and fishermen were asked to stay at shore. State authorities turned 282 schools into relief centers in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. The city’s port halted cargo operations, officials said. Twenty-three ships were moved to safer areas. About 150,000 people were moved to shelters in Nellore, district official B. Sridhar said.

In Sri Lanka, thousands have been displaced due to heavy rain and strong winds. The nation’s Disaster Management Center said 4,627 people were displaced by flooding and 56 fled because of a landslide threat in the island’s central region. One woman died Tuesday after a tree branch fell on her, while another person was killed in flooding, the agency said. Floods also damaged about 1,000 houses, it said.

Winds from hurricane Sandy have seriously damaged a building in Manhattan as the centre of the storm heads towards land. Part of the facade of a four story building in the West Village collapsed at about 6.30pm, leaving rooms open to the elements but no one injured. Elsewhere parts of midtown Manhattan were evacuated when a crane on top of a skyscraper partially collapsed. The Fire Department of New York initially reported a “multi-dwelling building collapse” on Twitter, although pictures quickly emerged showing that the front wall of the top two floors of the building was missing, rather than the entire structure collapsing. Images showed a fire truck at the scene, with a writer from the Huffington Post reporting that firefighters had to enter the building to help people out. The fire department later said that no one had been hurt. “There are no injuries or people trapped at 92 8th Ave building collapse, which involved the facade of the structure,” it said in a tweet. “Firefighters went in and rescued the residents. Some residents said same thing happened to same building 20 years ago,” said Meg Robertson, a reporter at HuffPost Live. She posted several pictures of the scene on her Twitter account. The building, 92 8th Avenue, is located between 14th and 15th streets in Manhattan. The main threat to buildings in New York City had been expected to come from flooding, with a mandatory evacuation order in place in many places along Manhattan’s coastline. Earlier a crane on top of the One 57 building, which is under construction on west 57th street further north in Manhattan, appeared to come loose from its bearings in high winds. Pictures showed the crane hanging upside down from the top of the building, which is set to be luxury flats. Police and the fire department evacuated all buildings north and south of 57th street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, CNN reported. The Le Parker Meridien hotel on West 56th Street was also evacuated, according to reports, with guests being transferred to a different hotel. In New York bridges across the East River have been closed, including the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, with people warned to stay inside.

City workers in Langley, B.C., are cleaning up after two mudslides stuck on Wednesday morning, forcing the evacuation of one home and the closure of 264th Street between 72nd and 84th avenues. Just after 5 a.m. PT, mud rushed down the side of a steep slope and crossed a rural stretch of the 7700 block of 264th Street, moving a cement barrier. The slide also covered the side of a home below the road. No one was injured and there was only minor damage to the house. About 100 metres of 264th Street has been closed for much of the morning. It’s not clear when the road might reopen. While officials were cleaning up the first slide, officials confirmed they were responding to reports of a second landslide in the municipality, this time at 252A Street and 72nd Avenue. The second slide was much smaller and did not affect any roads or homes, city officials said. City officials say small mudslides on the hills into Glen Valley are common this time of year. A rainfall warning is in effect in the area with between 10 and 20 millimetres expected to fall throughout the day.

Radiation / Nuclear

LONGVIEW, Wash. (AP) — Oregon State University researchers have found traces of radioactive cesium from last year’s Japanese nuclear reactor disaster in West Coast albacore tuna.

The amount is far too small to harm people who eat the fish, the scientists said.

Scientists from the university and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration collected and tested fish caught off the West Coast before and after the March 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami that caused a nuclear reactor to release radioactive material, the Longview Daily News (http://bit.ly/QIcdV8) reported.

The team’s findings are in line with work by researchers in California, who announced in May that they had found traces of radioactive cesium in bluefin tuna caught off the southern coast.

“We’re still processing new fish, but so far the radiation we’re detecting is far below the level of concern for human safety,” said Delvan Neville, a graduate researcher with OSU’s Radiation Health Physics program and a co-investigator on the project.

Albacore tuna is a $41 million business in the Pacific Northwest, and fishermen from the region caught about 10,000 tons last year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Washington fishermen accounted for about 53 percent of the haul, and the remainder came through Oregon docks.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and NOAA have jointly stated they have “high confidence” in the safety of U.S. seafood products because the radiation levels are so low.

The OSU team said its findings could reveal information about where Pacific albacore tuna travel and how the ocean’s ecosystem can be linked to events thousands of miles away.

Nuclear reactors in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast are being monitored for potential impacts by Hurricane Sandy, a Category 1 storm that may strike anywhere from Delaware to southern New England.

“Because of the size of it, we could see an impact to coastal and inland plants,” Neil Sheehan, a spokesman based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said by phone. “We will station inspectors at the sites if we know they could be directly impacted.”

The current Hurricane Center track calls for the system to come ashore just south of Delaware Bay on Oct. 30.

Contingency Plans

Nuclear plants in the projected path of the hurricane include North Anna and Surry in Virginia, Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, Hope Creek and Salem in New Jersey, Indian Point in New York and Millstone in Connecticut. The NRC is considering enhancing inspector coverage of these reactors, Sheehan said in an e-mail today.

Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PEG) must shut all units at the Salem and Hope Creek plants two hours before the onset of hurricane-force winds greater than 74 mph, according to Sheehan. An “unusual event” would be declared if the winds are sustained for greater than 15 minutes or if the water level reaches 99.5 feet or higher, he said. Such an event is the lowest of four level of emergency used by the commission.

Salem Unit 2 is currently shut for refueling, while Unit 1 was operating at 83 percent of capacity today during maintenance on the circulating water system. Hope Creek ran at full power. The three units have a combined capacity of 3,365 megawatts.

“We are in phase one of our severe-weather plan,” Joe Delmar, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail responding to questions. “This includes inspecting, removing and securing outside areas for potential missiles, objects that could go airborne, and staging of emergency equipment and supplies.”

Millstone Reactor

Dominion Resources Inc.’s Millstone plant is monitoring Sandy’s progress and preparing to adjust staff as it comes closer, according to Ken Holt, a plant spokesman based in Richmond, Virginia. The plant must shut if winds reach 90 mph.

“We would shut down in advance of the storm if they were expected to be 90 miles per hour at the site,” Holt said by phone today. “Floods and high winds are a threat because they can knock off off-site power and we’d then need to activate emergency generators for power to put the plant to safe conditions.”

Xcel Energy Inc. says its Prairie Island nuclear plant near Red Wing declared an “unusual event” after some security equipment failed. The Minneapolis-based utility says the event happened around 2:15 p.m. Wednesday and was declared over just before 6 p.m. Xcel says there was no release of radioactive material and that there is no danger to the public or plant employees. Plant officials made the declaration after some security equipment temporarily failed. The equipment has been restored, and plant officials are investigating the cause. The plant maintained security during the event. Xcel says it notified federal, state and local officials. The declaration is the lowest of four emergency classifications. Prairie Island’s Unit 2 continues to operate at full power. Unit 1 remains offline has part of a scheduled refueling outage.

The death toll of the deadly Marburg hemorrhagic fever in Uganda has risen to eight and nine other people have tested positive of the highly infectious diseases, a top ministry of health official said. Christine Ondoa, Minister of Health told reporters on Monday that the latest patient died on October 27 at an isolation ward at Rushoroza Health Centre, in the western Ugandan district of Kabale, the epicenter of the outbreak. The disease broke out on October 4 in Kabale. Five people have tested positive of the highly infectious viral hemorrhagic fever in Kabale, two others in the capital Kampala and another two in the western district of Ibanda. “To date, the death toll of both the probable and confirmed cases stands at eight. Since the onset of the outbreak, we have collected a total of 45 samples of which nine were confirmed positive,” said Ondoa. She said the ministry has established temporary isolation facilities in Kabale, Mbarara, Ibanda and Kampala to accommodate the suspected and confirmed cases. “We have assembled a team of experts to work in the newly established isolation facilities and they are expected in these districts today. We also plan to undertake infection control procedures in these facilities as safety measures for the workers and the admitted patients,” said Ondoa. A total of seven student nurses who attended to a Marburg patient at Ibanda Hospital and died on October 24 at Mbarara Regional Hospital have been quarantined. The ministry is also monitoring a total 436 people who had contact with the patients. “Those being monitored got into contact with either the dead or confirmed cases. The team continues to monitor them on a daily basis for possible signs and symptoms of this highly infectious disease until they have completed 21 days without showing any signs and symptoms,”Ondoa said.

Officials at San Quentin State Prison say the prison is on a medical lockdown after at least two inmates became sick with chickenpox. Prison spokesman Lt. Sam Robinson says the prison has been locked down since last Friday, with only employees being allowed to enter and leave the facility. He could not say when the lockdown would be lifted. Robinson says the last time there was a medical lockdown at the prison was in March of last year when at least four inmates became sick with chickenpox. The Centers for Disease Control describes chickenpox as a “very contagious disease” that spreads easily from infected people to others who have never had chickenpox or have never received the chickenpox vaccine. San Quentin, located north of San Francisco, is the oldest prison in California. It houses about 3,800 inmates.

Biohazard name:

Chicken Pox

Biohazard level:

2/4 Medium

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.

A previously unknown disease which has claimed more than 30 lives in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region this month has been identified as yellow fever, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday. Preparations for a mass vaccination campaign are now underway. The outbreak was first detected early this month when a number of people in the central and southern regions of Darfur became ill and eventually died. Sudanese media said the victims suffered from a number of symptoms, including diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding from both the mouth and nose. Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the World Health Organization (WHO), on Tuesday said it had been informed by Sudan’s Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) that the outbreak is being caused by yellow fever. Since the first week of October, a total of 84 suspected cases, including 32 deaths, have been reported in the districts of Azoom, Kass, Mershing, Nertiti, Nyala, Wadi Salih and Zalingei. “FMoH said that the immediate priority is to control the vector, reinforcing the disease surveillance system and raising public awareness on the prevention and control of this disease,” Jasarevic said. “Preparations for a mass vaccination campaign are underway to vaccinate the at risk population in Darfur.”According to Darfur radio station Dabanga, however, at least 37 people are believed to have died as a result of the disease while 125 others have been infected. The radio station quoted a resident as saying that local authorities were slow to react and did not immediately take necessary action to contain the outbreak. “FMoH, WHO, as well as health partners are working on ground to ensure timely containment of the outbreak,” Jasarevic added. There is no cure for yellow fever, which is an acute viral haemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes. Treatment is aimed at reducing the symptoms for the comfort of patients, and measures often taken include supportive care to treat dehydration and fever and blood transfusion if needed. “It is a preventable disease with symptoms and severity varying from case to case,” Jasarevic explained. “Protective measures like the use of bed nets, insect repellent and long clothing are considered the best methods to contain an outbreak. Vaccination is the single most important measure for preventing yellow fever.”

Biohazard name:

Yellow Fever

Biohazard level:

2/4 Medium

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.

Space

A magnetic piece of rock stirred up controversy last week, but scientists confirmed, and reconfirmed, that the mysterious object in Novato residents Lisa and Kurt Webberâs backyard was a meteorite. And to prove it, a second was discovered just miles from the Webbersâ home. Webber gave the meteorite to her neighbor Glenn Rivera as a birthday gift. He helped her analyze the chunk before calling scientists. The meteorite broke off from the meteor shower that blazed over the night sky at approximately 7:44 p.m. on Oct. 17. It also happened to be Riveraâs birthday. âAs a result, Glenn was asked by the scientific team to ride in the airship Eureka from Moffett Field on Friday,â said Leigh Blair, Riveraâs mother. âThey flew over Novato and all the way up to Lake Berryessa, following the calculated trajectory of the meteor, looking for signs of larger meteorites on the ground.â Peter Jenniskens, the meteor scientist at the Seti Institute, a nonprofit scientific and education organization that has projects sponsored by NASA and other foundations and research groups, at first dismissed the first rock because the surface appeared strange and weathered, unlike most meteorites. But everything changed when a second rock showed small specks of what seemed to be metal, when observed under a microscope. Brien Cook, a meteorite hunter and Sacramento resident, found the second rock in the Novato area, but too dismissed it as a meteorite until the two chunks were compared. After cutting it open and looking inside, he knew he had found an extraterrestrial treasure. Cook is offering one chip of his meteorite on eBay. It weighs 6.6 grams, and objects like it regularly sell for approximately $100 a gram, he said. Lisa Webber, a University of California San Francisco nurse, found the meteorite in her backyard on Oct. 20. She returned the piece to Jenniskens, and he will send samples of both rocks to a noted meteorite expert Professor Alan E. Rubin of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA.

Biological Hazards / Wildlife / Environmental pollution / Hazmat

Two men were transported to the hospital Wednesday afternoon after a bees’ nest was disturbed when one of the men, an unidentified DirectTV employee, was working on a home in the 40000 block of W. Magnolia Road. “It was terrible,” Phoebe Lechuga, one of the home’s five residents, said. “They were flying everywhere.” Lechuga’s 33-year-old son, Resugio Furwilder, was also transported to the hospital. Furwilder went outside to help the DirectTV worker and was stung himself, Lechuga said. Her daughter, Vanessa Lechuga, 27, was also stung but was not taken to the hospital. Lechuga said at first the worker thought there were only a few bees and didn’t come inside after the first stings.

New Jersey environmental officials say 336,000 gallons of diesel fuel spilled after a storage tank was lifted and ruptured from the surge from superstorm Sandy. The Coast Guard says all the spilled oil is believed to be contained by booms put in the water. Officials said today the spill happened Monday night at the Motiva oil tank facility in Woodbridge. Coast Guard spokesman Les Tippets says a secondary tank caught most of the oil and that the liquid that escaped moved into the Arthur Kill, the waterway separating New Jersey from New York’s Staten Island. New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Larry Ragonese says the company reported the spill and hired contractors to clean it up.

Three people from North Laurel, Maryland have been taken to the hospital Tuesday morning with carbon monoxide poisoning, caused by a generator running inside their house. Authorities reported that Howard County Fire crews and paramedics found a man and two women inside the home in Brevard Street after responding to a 911 call which was made by one of the women. The victims suffered elevated levels of carbon monoxide. According to a spokesman from the Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services, the three were transported to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. The two females have been released on Tuesday morning but the male, who was in critical condition, remained in the hospital for further treatment. The spokesman confirmed that all three patients underwent therapy in the hyperbaric chamber at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center. The male patient is scheduled to receive another hyperbaric therapy. Police said the firefighters discovered a generator operating at the bottom of the stairs on the ground level of the residence. It was placed in a doorway leading to the garage, but the garage door was closed, restricting ventilation. Firefighters later confirmed that the amount of carbon monoxide inside the house was 30 times more than the normal level.

Emergency officials have evacuated a few dozen homes near a derailed train in southern Jefferson County over concerns of hazardous material leaks. The Paducah & Louisville Railway train derailed just after 6 a.m. EDT Monday near Dixie Highway. Emergency officials are asking residents within a 2 ½-mile radius of the scene to stay inside their homes until they are told they can leave. Beuchel Fire assistant chief Rick Harrison says the train has a “small leak” of butadiene, which is a chemical used in the manufacturing of rubber. No other leaks have been found. Tom Garrett, president of P&L Railway, says the train was on its way to Louisville from Paducah with a total of 57 cars. He says company officials have not yet been able to get to the scene because of safety concerns. Garrett says the two crew members on the train were not hurt. Officials say eight of the 40 cars on the train were off the track.

Ten people have been killed and hundreds evacuated from their homes after extreme weather and flash floods hit southern Spain on Friday.

The flooding, caused by torrential rain after months of drought, hit areas around Murcia and Almería in the south-east and Málaga in the south.

A 52-year-old British woman is believed to be missing in Almería, according to a government official. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said it was looking into the reports as “a matter of urgency”.

The weather brought down a motorway bridge and cars were swept away. Officials in the region said at least 600 people had been evacuated from their homes.

Spanish radio said a young boy and girl who were found drowned in a car in the town of Puerto Lumbreras were among the dead. A middle-aged woman was also killed in Lorca, which was badly damaged in an earthquake last year.

Jackie Broad, 58, said her home in Mojacar, Almería, was too high up to be flooded but she had seen cars get washed away by raging torrents of water. “The river at the bottom of our road has burst its banks. There was a lot of water, in some places up to the roofs of shops and houses.

“The water has run away now but it’s left about a foot of mud everywhere. A lot of the roads are closed so we’re having trouble getting around,” she said.

Five people have so far died in Murcia, three in Almería and two in Málaga. Five people originally declared missing have been found alive.

A tornado that also swept through the town of Gandia on Friday knocked down a ferris wheel, injuring 35 fair workers. The town hall website said 15 of the injured were seriously hurt. Local media reported that the fair had been closed to the public at the time.

The flooding disrupted transport links, with at least two motorways closed and one flight diverted to Seville from Malaga.

Spain’s weather agency said up to 245 litres of water had fallen per square metre in the area on Friday.

In 2011, a British couple died in a flash flood in Finestrat, on the Costa Blanca, after torrential rain caused a river to burst its banks.

The heavy rain is expected to continue throughout Saturday before moving towards the Balearic Islands.

A child stands at the edge of a flooded road in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

A man has died after being swept away by floodwater as heavy rain and thunderstorms continued to batter much of England, Scotland and Ireland.

West Mercia police said the man was overcome by the water in a stream at Bitterley, near Ludlow in Shropshire, shortly after 10.30am on Thursday.

The accident was reported by witnesses and the man’s body was found after an extensive search involving police, fire crews and the Severn Area Rescue Association.

Residents named him as maths teacher Mike Ellis, who lived in the village with his wife.

The West Midlands, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire all suffered heavy flooding during the day.

Later the storm spread north, closing both main rail lines between England and Scotland, with the west coast mainline closed at Tebay in Cumbria and a landslip blocking the east coast line near to Berwick.

At one point the Tyne road tunnel was closed in both directions, and police warned motorists stuck in traffic to stay with their cars until emergency services reached them. Residents in several locations across Tyneside had to be evacuated.

The Environment Agency urged people to be on alert for more flash flooding across the Midlands, northern England and Scotland as the Met Office forecast outbreaks of torrential rain across central and northern parts of the country. There was a continued risk of surface flooding if drainage systems were overwhelmed by rainfall.

The heavy rain could also cause rivers to rise rapidly, the EA warned, and it advised the public to stay away from swollen rivers and not to drive through floodwater. It also urged people to check its website and Twitter feed for the latest updates and flood warnings.

There were seven flood warnings in place for the Midlands, two for the north-east, one for the north-west and one for Scotland.

Flooding has also hit Ireland, where more than 50 homes and many businesses were flooded and several thousand left without power after 50mm of rain fell in a seven-hour period across Cork.

There were fears in Northern Ireland that overnight flooding which swamped Belfast could happen again. Further downpours were forecast as thousands struggled to clean up damage caused by flooding across the city and parts of Co Antrim.

Emergency services reported receiving more than 700 callouts linked to flooding in Belfast, while the region’s water authority said it handled nearly 3,000 flood calls, and 1,000 homes were hit by power cuts.

Flooding last year killed 470 people and impacted 9.1 million others, Kamal said.

In the worst-affected area of Sindh province, in southeastern Pakistan, the waters submerged more than 4.5 million acres of farming land, damaging an estimated 80% of cash crops.

Many in the country were at that point barely recovering from massive and deadly flooding in August 2010, which left a fifth of the country submerged by water, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.

Those floods lasted for weeks, affecting more than 20 million people and leaving 1,985 people dead, Kamal said.

Much of the land inundated in 2010 was in Punjab province, Pakistan’s breadbasket, where many people live off the soil and their livestock. Great hardship followed for millions in the wake of the flooding.

Monsoon floods in Pakistan have killed 371 people and affected nearly 4.5 million, the government’s disaster relief agency said on Friday.

Pakistan has suffered devastating floods in the past two years, including the worst in its history in 2010, when catastrophic inundations across the country killed almost 1,800 people and affected 21 million.

As in 2010 and 2011, most of those hit by the latest floods are in Sindh province, where the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said 2.8 million were affected, with nearly 890,000 in Punjab and 700,000 in Baluchistan.

Nearly 290,000 people around the country have been forced to seek shelter in relief camps, NDMA said in figures published on its website.

The floods began in early September, with nearly 80 killed in flash floods, mostly in the northwest and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

An NDMA spokesman said the government was not yet appealing for foreign assistance.

“The government’s point of view is that the situation will be handled from own resources,” Ahmad Kamal told AFP.

More than a million acres (400,000 hectares) of crops have been destroyed by the floods across the country, NDMA said, and nearly 8,000 cattle have been killed.

UN children’s agency UNICEF, quoting a separate flood assessment, said at least 2.8 million people had been affected, including 1.4 million children, of whom more than 390,000 are under five.

UNICEF said it was providing 183,000 people a day with drinking water but warned it urgently needed more funds.

“Children from very poor families are among the worst affected by the severe flooding and they need our immediate help,” said UNICEF Pakistan Deputy Representative Karen Allen.

“UNICEF urgently needs $15.4 million to scale up its water, sanitation and hygiene response to reach around 400,000 people over the next three to six months.”

UNICEF said that according to its assessment, more than half of those affected by the floods were concentrated in just five districts, two each in Sindh and Baluchistan and one in Punjab.

It said 360,000 people had been left without shelter and three quarters of children in the five worst-affected districts were unable to go to school, either because the buildings have been destroyed or because they are being used as temporary shelters.

The UN agency voiced particular concern about children forced from their homes, saying loss of access to safe water supplies left them vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, measles, polio and pneumonia.

More than 20,000 families in Sindh have been provided with hygiene kits including water purification tablets, UNICEF said, as part of efforts to prevent deadly water-borne diseases.

Torrential downpours in southern Spain have caused flash floods that have killed one person, swamped homes and swept cars down roads transformed into raging rivers. An official in the town of Alora says homes were destroyed and at least one woman was killed. Rescue workers are searching to determine if there are more victims. She did not have more details and spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with town policy. Images in Spanish media showed wrecked cars carried away by flash floods, rivers overflowing their banks and people sweeping muddy water out of their homes. The heavy rains started early Friday morning. The hardest hit area included Alora and other nearby towns inland from the Mediterranean city of Malaga.

Epidemic Hazards / Diseases

ScienceDaily — An isolated outbreak of a deadly disease known as acute hemorrhagic fever, which killed two people and left one gravely ill in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the summer of 2009, was probably caused by a novel virus scientists have never seen before.

Collecting samples in the Jungles of Boma in 2009 after the outbreak. (Credit: Courtesy of Metabiota)

Described this week in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, the new microbe has been named Bas-Congo virus (BASV) after the province in the southwest corner of the Congo where the three people lived.

It was discovered by an international research consortium that included the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and University of California, Davis (UCD), Global Viral, the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon, the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Metabiota and others.

“Known viruses, such as Ebola, HIV and influenza, represent just the tip of the microbial iceberg,” said Joseph Fair, PhD, a co-author and vice president of Metabiota. “Identifying deadly unknown viruses, such as Bas-Congo virus, gives us a leg up in controlling future outbreaks.”

“These are the only three cases known to have occurred, although there could be additional outbreaks from this virus in the future,” said Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of laboratory medicine at UCSF and director of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center, who spearheaded the UCSF effort to identify the virus. Chiu and his team continue to work on new diagnostics to detect the virus so that health officials in Congo and elsewhere can quickly identify it should it emerge again.

One odd characteristic of the Bas-Congo virus, Chiu said, is that while a number of other viruses in Africa also cause deadly outbreaks of acute hemorrhagic fever — Ebola virus, Lassa virus and Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever virus to name a few — the new virus is unlike any of them.

Genetically it is more closely related to the types of viruses that cause rabies, which are known to infect people with a very different sort of disease — a neurological illness that is uniformly fatal if untreated but may take months to develop.

An antibody test developed in this study was applied to the one patient who survived and to others who had come into contact with him. It suggested that the disease may be spread from person to person but likely originated from some other source, such as an insect or rodent.

The identity of this animal “reservoir” and the precise mode of transmission for the virus remain unclear and are currently being investigated by Metabiota and the central African members of the consortium through the PREDICT Project of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Program. (http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/ohi/predict/index.cfm)

How the New Virus Emerged

In the summer of 2009, a 15-year old boy in a small rural community called Mangala village suddenly fell ill and developed a bleeding nose, bleeding gums and bloody vomit. He rapidly worsened, dying within three days of the first signs of illness.

A week later, a 13-year old girl who attended the same school and lived in the same neighborhood as the boy came down with a similar, serious illness. She declined just as rapidly and also died within three days. One week after that, the male nurse who cared for this girl began showing the same symptoms, and he was transferred to a hospital in Boma, a nearby port city that sits along the Congo River upstream from Africa’s Atlantic coast.

Members of the consortium, who had initiated a project to diagnose unusual cases of severe hemorrhagic fever, obtained blood samples collected from the nurse by the Congolese doctors and sent them to the laboratory of Eric Leroy, PhD, doctor of veterinary medicine at the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon. There the samples were tested for traces of any known virus, but nothing was found. The Metabiota scientists then solicited the expertise of Chiu at UCSF and Eric Delwart at the Blood Systems Research Institute (BSRI) in San Francisco to aid in the diagnosis.

The researchers ultimately identified a completely new virus as the cause of the mysterious illness through a powerful strategy for identifying novel pathogens known as “deep sequencing,” in which millions of DNA sequences are generated from a clinical sample and then pieced together using computer algorithms combined with human analysis.

Distinct Attributes of Bas-Congo

The Bas-Congo virus belongs to a family of viruses known as the rhabdoviruses, a large family of viruses that infect plants, insects and mammals, including humans. The most famous member of this family is the virus that causes rabies. But even among the rhabdoviruses, Bas-Congo is something of an outlier, being very genetically distinct from other members of the family.

What’s most unusual about this virus, though, said Chiu, is what it does to people.

No other rhabdoviruses are known to cause the acute, rapid and deadly hemorrhagic fever seen in the three cases in the Congo. Rabies, for instance, can be a deadly disease if untreated, but the course of rabies in humans is nothing like the rapid and deadly onset seen with the Bas-Congo virus. There is some precedent, however, for hemorrhagic disease from rhabdoviruses in the animal kingdom: fish rhabdoviruses are known to cause hemorrhagic septicemia — acute bleeding and death — in affected fish.

The third patient had enormous amounts of BASV in his bloodstream just two days after he fell ill — more than a million copies in every milliliter of blood.

The BASV sequence was also used to design an antibody test for the virus, an effort led by Graham Simmons at the BSRI, another member of the consortium. Antibodies are blood immune proteins produced in response to an infection. The antibody test allowed the researchers to screen both the third patient with acute hemorrhagic fever and other people who had come into contact with the third patient, including the nurse who cared for him in the Boma hospital. High levels of BASV-specific antibodies were found in the third patient, establishing that he indeed had been infected with Bas-Congo virus. The same antibodies were also found in the second nurse, even though he never actually became sick.

“What this suggests is that the disease may be transmissible from person to person — though it’s most likely to have originated from some other source,” said Nathan Wolfe, PhD, founder and chairman of Global Viral, and a co-author on the paper. “The fact that it belongs to a family of viruses known to infect a wide variety of mammals, insects and other animals means that it may perpetually exist in insect or other ‘host’ species and was accidentally passed to humans through insect bites or some other means.”

The research consortium includes San Francisco-based Global Viral, Metabiota, UCSF, BSRI, as well as researchers with the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon; the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier, France; the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, TX; the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Los Angeles; Stanford University; and the Howard Hughes Medical Center.

This work was funded by support from Google.org, the Skoll Foundation, the government of Gabon, Total-Fina-Elf Gabon, and the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes de la France, the U.S. Department of Defense Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, Division of Global Emerging Infections, Surveillance Operations (AFHSC GEIS) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (DTRA-CBEP), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats Program, PREDICT project. Additional funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health provided via grant numbers R01-HL083254, R01-HL105770, R56-AI089532, and R01-HL105704 and by an Abbott Viral Discovery Award.

Riley Hospital for Children is back in operation after a mysterious illness resulted in a lockdown on Thursday. Seven adults got sick and four others were hospitalized Thursday due to an unknown substance they were exposed to inside the emergency room at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health. All of those hospitalized have since been relased according to Riley spokeswoman, Abigail Gras. It all started with an odd smell, which Riley staff members confirmed, prompting a call to the Indianapolis Fire Department. At approximately 11:50 a.m., an IFD hazardous materials team responded, along with members of the Department of Homeland Security, to investigate a possible chemical spill inside the hospital’s emergency room. IFD spokesman Lt. Derrick Sayles later said there wasn’t a chemical spill. Crews were still trying to identify the mystery subtance that caused seven adults to fall ill at Riley, even though investigators admit they may never know what made them sick. “At this time, everything we found is inconclusive,” said Indianapolis Homeland Security Director Gary Coons at a news conference Friday afternoon.Marion County Health Department Director, Dr. Virginia Caine, confirmed the inconclusive findings, “We’ve used the most sophisticated tests that we have already,” she said. “Usually when you get to this stage, it’s very rare that you identify something later.” Riley says its hospital did everything right to respond: a major lockdown and extensive testing by Hazmat, the Health Department, even experts at the National Guard. They ruled out benzene and any gases associated with bio-terrorism. “Our monitors would pick up on any kind of chemical like that,” Coons told reporters. Thankfully, all 7 adults who were sickened reported no additional symptoms hours after exposure to the mystery substance, nor has any one else reported getting sick since it all began. Unfortunately, them may never know what made them sick. As of today, health officials report that we may likely never know what noxious substance triggered the hospital lockdown and caused people to get sick.

Biohazard name:

Unidentified illness

Biohazard level:

2/4 Medium

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.

Climate Change

Glaciers on Svalbard are retreating rapidly. Credit: William D’Andrea (Phys.org)—Summers on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard are now warmer than at any other time in the last 1,800 years, including during medieval times when parts of the northern hemisphere were as hot as, or hotter, than today, according to a new study in the journal Geology.

“The Medieval Warm Period was not as uniformly warm as we once thought—we can start calling it the Medieval Period again,” said the study’s lead author, William D’Andrea, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Our record indicates that recent summer temperatures on Svalbard are greater than even the warmest periods at that time.” The naturally driven Medieval Warm Period, from about 950 to 1250, has been a favorite time for people who deny evidence that humans are heating the planet with industrial greenhouse gases. But the climate reconstruction from Svalbard casts new doubt on that era’s reach, and undercuts skeptics who argue that current warming is also natural. Since 1987, summers on Svalbard have been 2 degrees to 2.5 degrees C (3.6 to 4.5 degrees F) hotter than they were there during warmest parts of the Medieval Warm Period, the study found. Researchers produced the 1,800 year climate record by analyzing levels of unsaturated fats in algae buried in the sediments of Kongressvatnet lake, in western Svalbard. In colder water, algae make more unsaturated fats, or alkenones; in warmer water, they produce more saturated fats. Like pages in a book, the unsaturation level of fats can provide a record of past climate. So far, most Arctic climate records have come from ice cores that preserve only annual layers of cold-season snowfall, and thus cold-season temperatures. But lake sediments, with their record of summertime temperatures, can tell scientists how climate varied the rest of the year and in places where ice sheets are absent. “We need both ice core and lake sediment records,” said Elisabeth Isaksson, a glaciologist at the Norwegian Polar Institute who was not involved in the study. “Here, Billy has found something that tells a different, more detailed story.” In looking at how summers on Svalbard varied, researchers also discovered that the region was not particularly cold during another recent anomalous period—the “Little Ice Age” of the 18th and 19th centuries, when glaciers on Svalbard surged to their greatest extent in the last 10,000 years and glaciers in many parts of Western Europe also grew.They suggest that more snow, rather than colder temperatures, may have fed the growth of Svalbard glaciers.

Evidence from tree rings and ice cores shows that southern Greenland and parts of North America were warmer from 950 to 1250 than today, with the Vikings taking advantage of ice-free waters to settle Greenland. Some regions also saw prolonged drought, including California, Nevada and the Mississippi Valley, leading some scientists to coin the term Medieval Climate Anomaly to emphasize the extreme shift in precipitation rather than temperature. A natural increase in solar radiation during this time was responsible for warming parts of the northern hemisphere, with a rise in volcanic activity from 1100 to 1260 causing milder winters, University of Massachusetts scientist Ray Bradley explained in a 2003 Perspective piece in Science. Bradley is a co-author of the Svalbard lake sediment study. Western Svalbard began to gradually warm in 1600, the researchers found, when the northern arm of the Gulf Stream, known as the West Spitsbergen Current, may have brought more tropical water to the region. In 1890, the warming began to accelerate, with researchers attributing most of the warming since about 1960 to rising industrial greenhouse gas levels. Ice cores from Svalbard, by contrast, show a slight cooling over the last 1,800 years. The conflicting evidence suggests that temperatures may have fluctuated more sharply between winter and summer, said Anne Hormes, a quaternary geologist at the University Centre in Svalbard who was not involved in the study. D’Andrea and his colleagues dated their lake cores by analyzing grains of glass spewed by volcanoes hundreds of miles away in Iceland. Those past eruptions— Snæfellsjökullin 170, Hekla in 1104 and Öræfajökull in 1362—all left unique chemical time markers on Svalbard’s lake sediments. “We know fairly precisely when these eruptions occurred, which is rare in the geologic record,” said study co-author Nicholas Balascio, a scientist at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Recent temperature measurements show that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, with sea ice this summer shrinking to its smallest extent on record. Natural feedbacks are amplifying the warming as loss of reflective sea ice causes the ocean to absorb more of the sun’s energy, melting more sea ice, which causes more energy absorption, and so on. Climate models suggest that by 2100 Svalbard will warm more than any other landmass on earth, due to a combination of sea-ice loss and changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation, according to the International Panel on Climate Change 2007 report. In a study published last year in the journal Advances in Meteorology, Norwegian researchers estimate that average winter temperature in Svalbard could rise by as much as 10 degrees C, or 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sinkhole

Is the growing sinkhole crises at Bayou CorneLouisiana worsening? Is the state of Louisiana, the feds and Texas Brine Company doing enough to protect the area, the residents and the region?

On Tuesday, a 30 x 50 section caved in pulling down more trees and part of an access road.

According to the Advocate, “Other developments regarding the sinkhole emergency have emerged in recent days, state and parish officials said:

Sonar testing results of a damaged Texas Brine salt cavern and samples of material found in the cavern are being analyzed to better understand what happened to the cavern suspected as the cause of the sinkhole.

Testing of hydrocarbon liquids from a Texas Brine investigatory well into the cavern may provide a definite link between the cavern and the sinkhole.

Another location where natural gas bubbles to the surface of area waterways emerged and samples of its gas emissions have been captured for testing.

In announcing their cavern sustained damage, Texas Brine officials said Monday that a tool used to measure the depth of the underground cavern found its floor is 1,300 feet shallower than when it was plugged and abandoned in mid 2011. That new, shallower point is 4,000 feet underground.

The company said the findings indicated “some type of dense material has fallen to the bottom of the cavern.”

Parish and Louisiana Department of Natural Resources officials are trying to get a better idea about the nature and amount of material found Monday inside the 20-million-barrel salt cavern, said Patrick Courreges, DNR spokesman.

The sinkhole has been in existence now since August 3 of this year, prior to Hurricane Isaac.

According to environmental attorney Stuart Smith, something smells. Smith, who has been critical of the state and Texas Brine and others, stated today in a emailer sent to the public:

The Louisiana Office of Conservation Commissioner James Welsh ordered Texas Brine Co. of Houston Tuesday to turn over all studies and data supporting its claim that tremors caused the failure of the company’s salt cavern in Assumption Parish, the agency said.

The order, which threatens fines or penalties for noncompliance, follows Texas Brine’s statement late Monday night that regional seismic activity damaged an abandoned company salt cavern that has been suspected as the cause of a 4-acre sinkhole erupting near the Bayou Corne community.

You read that correctly. Remember, this is the site were Texas Brine warned state officials more than a year and a half ago that there might be problems with the cavern’s integrity, and then neither the company nor the state lifted a finger this summer when the ground began to shake and gases began bubbling up from underground. And yet now Texas Brine is trying to pull a fast one by claiming the earth tremors caused the cavern to sink — not the other way around.

A federal official called out the company’s claim as preposterous:

But, in Tuesday’s statement from the Office of Conservation, researchers also studying the quakes disputed that claim.

William Leith, U.S. Geological Survey senior adviser for earthquake and geologic hazards, said that the USGS consensus is that the seismic activity detected in the area is a consequence of the cavern collapse, not the cause of the collapse and sinkhole/slurry area, the office’s statement says.

The bottom line just keeps growing bigger in Bayou Corne, and the ultimate bottom line is this: Somebody is going to have to pay for both the environmental carnage and the psychological stresses have been dumped on this small bayou community. Now Texas Brine has the audacity to portray this as an act of God, when clearly this crisis was created by humans acting recklessly. Even if the sinkhole swallows the entire town, it can’t swallow the truth.

Volcanic Activity

On 22. September, a French-German team sets out from La Reunion to map the upwelling of hot magma that powers one of the oldest and most active regions of volcanic activity in the world. An expedition blog will keep interested landlubbers up to date.

Volcanic activity on and around La Reunion is driven by a localized upwelling of hot buoyant magma. Unlike most magma sources, this is not located on the boundary between two tectonic plates, and rises from much greater depths.

It is a so-called hotspot, and has left behind on the overlying mobile crust a track of volcanic activity that stretches 5500 km northwards to the Deccan Plateau in India. Some 65 million years ago, in a process that had a massive impact on world climate, the Deccan area was covered with enormous amounts of lava as the Indian Plate passed over the hotspot.

Such a long-lived upwelling of hot molten rock, which penetrates the overlying material like a blowtorch, is referred to as a mantle plume. Where exactly mantle plumes originate is the subject of a controversial debate among geoscientists.

During the course of a French-German expedition, LMU geophysicist Dr. Karin Sigloch, leader of the German contingent, wants to find out more about the putative plume under La Reunion. The goal is to determine the depth of the plume and to map the conduits by which the magma reaches the Earth’s surface.

The largest plume survey campaign ever “We want to look deeper into the Earth’s interior than any previous expedition, down to the bottom of the mantle at a depth of about 2900 km; earlier efforts reached half that depth, at most,” says Sigloch. To achieve this goal, the researchers must deploy a dense array of seismometers over a wide area.

On 22 September, the team will board the French research vessel Marion Dufresne on a cruise that will place nearly 60 seismometers on the seabed, dispersed over an area of some 4 million km2. As 30 additional instruments will be installed on land, this will be the largest such campaign ever undertaken. Data from a further 70 or so observatories located along the coasts of the Indian Ocean will complement the results obtained with the new network.

The data collected will be used to create three-dimensional tomographic images that will give us a picture of the Earth from the bottom of the crust to the core, and provide new insights into the structure, dynamics and history of the Earth.

As they effectively short-circuit the transport of heat from the core to the surface, plumes may play an important role in the Earth’s heat budget, and are a major force in shaping the Earth’s surface. Analysis of the new data will begin in a year’s time, after the German RV Meteor retrieves the newly deployed seismometers from the seabed.

In addition to the team from LMU, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, the universities in Frankfurt and Munster, the University of La Reunion and the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris (IPG Paris) are involved in the project.

Extreme Temperatures/ Weather

August 2012 was the globe’s 4th warmest August on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).NASA rated August 2012 the 6th warmest on record. August 2012 global land temperatures were the 2nd warmest on record, and global ocean temperatures were the 5th warmest on record. August 2012 was the 330th consecutive month with global temperatures warmer than the 20th century average; the last time global temperatures were below average was February 1985. Global satellite-measured temperatures in August for the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere were 3rd warmest in the 34-year record, according to the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH). Wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, has a comprehensive post on the notable weather events of August in his August 2012 Global Weather Extremes Summary.

Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for August 2012. Most areas of the world experienced much higher-than-average monthly temperatures, including much of Canada, Southeast Europe, and Western Asia. Central Russia was much cooler than average. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) .

El Niño watch continues
Sea surface temperatures were at 0.5°C above average as of September 17 in the equatorial Pacific off the coast of South America, and have been near or above the 0.5°C above average–the threshold needed for a weak El Niño event–since the beginning of July. However, winds, pressures, and cloud cover over the region have not responded in the fashion typically associated with an El Niño, and NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) classified conditions as being neutral in their September 6 El Niño discussion. They continued their El Niño watch, and gave a 69% chance that an El Niño event will be in place by the end of September. El Niño conditions tend to decrease Atlantic hurricane activity, by increasing wind shear over the tropical Atlantic. Wind shear has been close to average over the tropical Atlantic since the beginning of hurricane season in June. However, the past few runs of the GFS model have predicted a significant rise in wind shear over the Caribbean and tropical Atlantic by early October, which may represent El Niño finally beginning to kick in and affect the atmospheric circulation over the Atlantic.

Figure 2. Arctic sea ice extent as of September 18, 2012 (black line) compared to the previous record low years, in millions of square kilometers. This year’s extent is far below any previous year, and is close to its minimum for the year. Satellite measurements of ice extent began in 1979. Image credit: Danish Meteorological Institute.

Arctic sea ice falls to all-time record low during August
August 2012 Arctic sea ice extent reached its lowest August extent in the 35-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The new sea ice record was set on August 26, a full three weeks before the usual end of the melting season. Every major scientific institution that tracks Arctic sea ice agrees that new records for low ice area, extent, and volume have been set (see the comprehensive collection of sea ice graphs here.) Satellite records of sea ice extent date back to 1979, though a 2011 study by Kinnard et al. shows that the Arctic hasn’t seen a melt like this for at least 1,450 years (see a more detailed article on this over at skepticalscience.com.) The latest September 18, 2012 extent of 3.5 million square kilometers is approximately a 50% reduction in the area of Arctic covered by sea ice, compared to the average from 1979 – 2000. The amount of open ocean exposed this September compared to September 1980 is about 43% of the size of the contiguous United States. The ice extent is close to its minimum for the year, and should start in increase within the next week or two, but that open water over the Arctic will provide a significant amount of heat and moisture to the atmosphere over the next few months that will significantly alter weather patterns. One possible impact may be an increase in the intensity and duration of extreme weather events during fall and winter.

Britain is bracing itself for a battering from gales and torrential rain – with forecasters predicting a month’s rainfall in one day. The Met Office and Environment Agency warned homeowners to be on standby as rivers threatened to burst their banks and motorists were advised to drive with caution. Fire crews across the south were also on alert as the wind and rain were predicted to get worse. Forecasters predict up to 80mm rainfall and 50mph winds over the next 36 hours, with pockets of the south west, northern England and Scotland particularly threatened by flooding. The Environment Agency has warned of significant travel disruption and flooding of properties over the next 24 hours. Paul Mott, senior meteorologist at MeteoGroup, warned: âThere is going to be a big change in the weather from what we have had recently. âThere is likely to be some localised flooding, and gusts of up to 60mph in parts of Scotland, which is enough to pull up the odd tree.â Parts of Britain have basked in warm temperatures in the mid-20s during September, a welcome break from the rain and wind that dogged much of July and August. But Environment Agency director of operations David Jordan said: âWe are expecting flooding across the country from this evening and in to Monday and Tuesday. âWe strongly urge people to sign up to flood warnings, keep a close eye on local weather forecasts and be prepared for the possibility of flooding.

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24.09.2012

Forest / Wild Fire

Spain

Autonomous Community of Valencia, [Chulilla, Gestalgar, Pedralba and Bugarra]

Around 2,000 people have had to be evacuated on Monday due to a wildfire that hit the Autonomous Community of Valencia in east Spain. The fire, which broke out around 50 kilometers north-west of the city of Valencia has sent villagers of Chulilla, Gestalgar, Pedralba and Bugarra to be evacuated because of the threat of the advancing flames. Over 600 people are currently combating the fire, among them firemen and members of Spain’s Emergency Military Unit (UME), with the help of a total of 31 planes and helicopters. However, fire-fighting has been made more difficult by strong gusts of wind in the region, while the smoke and dust has led to eight small roads being closed to the public. Authorities are optimistic that the arrival of cooler weather from the north-west will see a fall in temperatures and a reduction in wind-speeds, while there is also the possibility of some rain falling in the afternoon.

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Hurricane Miriam, churning far off the Mexican coast in the Pacific Ocean, strengthened to a Category 2 storm early Monday, US forecasters said.

The storm located 415 miles (665 kilometers) south southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, now displayed sustained winds of 105 miles (165 kilometers) an hour, the US National Hurricane Center said.

The center said Miriam was likely to strengthen further “during the next day or so” and possibly even become a major hurricane.

But it is then expected to move further north and lose strength once it encounters cold water and winds.

Strengthening of Typhoon Jelawat Monday has boosted the mighty storm’s status to “Super-typhoon.”

The powerful and extremely dangerous storm has continued to be of great interest to residents of northern Philippines and Taiwan. Those land masses could eventually feel directs effects of Jelawat, depending upon the path it takes.

Jelawat was not yet a “super-typhoon” at the time (about 0600 UTC Monday) of this impressive visible satellite shot, showing the tight, small eye of a well-wrapped tropical cyclone. Southern Philippines is at the lower left. (Joint Typhoon Warning Center)

By 1200 UTC, Monday, top sustained winds about the tightly wrapped storm were reckoned to be 130 knots, or 150 mph, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) said.

Late Monday morning, Eastern Time, the eye of Jelawat was located about 435 miles east of Manila, Philippines. Storm movement was towards the north-northwest at 5 mph, according to the JTWC.

The storm’s dangerous winds and heaviest rains were well east of the Philippines. However, interaction of the storm with the monsoon flow was triggering locally excessive rains in southeastern Philippines.

As it drifts towards the north and west, Jelawat will pose little or no direct threat to land before at least Wednesday, although it will continue to be a very powerful and dangerous storm.

However, beginning Wednesday, the exact path taken by the storm would be critical for both the Philippines and Taiwan.

Although the JTWC have forecast a track east of any land through at least Friday, when a position east of Taiwan is expected, some numerical forecast models have shown a more westerly track, passing over or near the northern mainland of the Philippines. Likewise, the more westerly scenarios could imply a late-week threat to Taiwan.

Elsewhere, Jelawat was joined as of Monday by a second tropical cyclone, the much weaker Tropical Storm Ewiniar.

Ewiniar was only a minimal tropical storm as of late morning, Eastern Time, having a center about 1,000 miles south of Tokyo, Japan.

Ewinar was forecast to strengthen by midweek, but without posing any threat to mainland Japan or any other sizable land mass.

GUWAHATI, India: Floods have forced nearly 1.5 million people to flee their homes in north-eastern India where authorities have declared a health alert, officials said on Monday. “Eighteen of 27 districts of Assam have been hit by floods with 1.4 million displaced and 11 people drowned in separated incidents in the past week,” the Disaster Management agency said in a statement.

The floods, caused by relentless rains, marked the second round of massive flooding in two months to hit India’s impoverished northeast and come towards the end of India’s June-to-September monsoon season. Nearly 130 people died and six million were displaced by floods in Assam state in July. Rescue officials said in the latest floods, at least 2,200 villages had been swamped by overflowing waters from the rain-swollen Brahmaputra River. Himanta Biswa Sarmah, the health minister of Assam state, told AFP that a “maximum health alert” to avert outbreaks of diarrhea or diseases such as typhoid had been declared in the devastated zone. The annual monsoon provides vital irrigation for India’s farmers but also claims many casualties from flooding and landslides.

Officials said flooding victims had been evacuated to temporary shelters on higher ground. “We’ve dispatched doctors and paramedics to ensure there is no outbreak of disease,” Sarmah said in Guwahati, Assam’s largest city. Victims and an opposition party staged protests in flood-hit areas against what they said were shortages of emergency supplies in the Congress-ruled state. “The government has failed to provide adequate relief supplies including food and medicines,” said Sarbananda Sonowal, a local leader of India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. “In many parts of the state people are even living without food,” he added. Rehab India Foundation, a voluntary group said heavy rains disrupted its plans to supply food and other essential items to flood-hit people.

Almost the entire 420 square kilometres (162 square miles) of Kaziranga National Park was also flooded, the Press Trust of India reported. The wildlife park is home to the world’s single largest population of one-horned rhinos. A 2012 census in Kaziranga counted 2,290 of the rhinos, out of a global population of 3,300. The species declined to near extinction in the early 1990s and is listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Floodwaters are on the rise in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, but they’re falling in the tourist town of Talkeetna. The Kenai River near Cooper Landing still hadn’t crested and there were reports of minor flooding, mainly areas close to the shoreline, National Weather Service forecaster Christian Cassell said late Saturday night. A flood warning is in effect until 10 p.m. Monday for the area and Cassell said moderate flooding is likely. “Cooper Landing homeowners are preparing for possible evacuation as Kenai Lake and the upper Kenai River banks are expected to reach broad crest Monday,” Kenai Peninsula Borough emergency officials said in a statement. Meanwhile, nearly 200 miles north, floodwaters receded Saturday from much of Talkeetna. That allowed residents to begin cleaning up the muddy mess left when the river flooded. But officials warned that the danger hadn’t passed and advised that people boil their water. Cassell said water levels have come down dramatically after rivers and streams draining from the Talkeetna Mountains crested. Meteorologists say they don’t expect rainfall to significantly increase river levels there, but a flood warning remained in effect for the area as many waterways remained above flood stage. The Talkeetna River crested at 15.65 feet on Friday, just below the level considered major flooding. It had receded to 12.5 feet by Saturday afternoon, just above the 12-foot flood mark. Only two streets in Talkeetna remained flooded, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Talkeetna is the last stop for climbers heading to Mount McKinley, North America’s tallest mountain. It also has an eclectic population, and h

At least 120 houses were damaged in Barangay Bagong Silangan, Quezon City, after a tornado tore through the community around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday. Barangay chairperson Crisell Beltran said the tornado blew off the roofs of houses and uprooted several trees and electric posts, causing a power outage in the area. According to residents, the tornado hit the communities of Area 5 and Lingayen in Sitio Veterans, Panther Street in Sitio Veterans 4 and a house in Spring Country. Fortunately, no one was reported killed or hurt when it struck. Beltran, meanwhile, asked the city government to provide assistance to affected residents, particularly those who need to repair their damaged houses. Most of the houses in the area which is situated near a small creek were made of light materials.

Huddled in their sleeping bags, the climbers first heard the avalanche roar towards them and then the sound of screaming before being swept hundreds of metres down the slopes of “Killer Mountain”.

Survivors of the weekend tragedy on Nepal’s Manaslu mountain, which killed at least nine people, said the scene resembled a war zone, with an entire camp destroyed by the wall of snow.

“We were sleeping in our tent after having dinner, when all of a sudden we heard the noise of other climbers screaming. Within moments, we were hit by the avalanche,” said Andreas Reiter, one of the trek’s survivors.

Reiter was among a group of European adventurers who were near the peak of the 8,156-metre (26,759-foot) Manaslu when the avalanche struck. They were asleep. It was 4:00 am on Sunday.

“I witnessed one of the team members die,” the 26-year-old German, who has broken his back, was quoted as telling The Himalayan Times as he recovered in hospital in Kathmandu.

Rescuers scaled down the search Monday for two French climbers and a Canadian still missing on Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest peak and one of the most challenging.

“He is undergoing an MRI test. He can speak and move his hands and legs.”

Another German being treated at the hospital was being treated for frostbite, the medic said.

Also among the survivors was Glen Plake, 48, a three-time freestyle skiing world champion from California. He described the site of the avalanche as “a war zone”.

“It was a major, major accident… There were 25 tents at camp three and all of them were destroyed,” he told the Epic TV video subscription service.

“Twelve tents at camp two were banged up and moved around.”

Plake told the company’s blog he was reading when he and a companion with whom he was sharing his tent heard a roar.

“Greg looked at me and said ‘that was a big gust of wind’, then a second later, ‘No, that was an avalanche’.

“Then it hit us. I was swept 300 metres over a serac and down the mountain and came to a stop still in my sleeping bag, still inside the tent, still with my headlamp on.”

Christian Trommsdorff, of France’s national union of mountain guides, said the avalanche happened at about 7,400 metres and carried away part of camp number three at 6,800 metres.

Expedition leader Garrett Madison said he and his team were sleeping at camp two, further down the mountain, when they were awoken by “snow, wind and ice penetrating our tents”.

“Fortunately everybody in our group was okay. However when we climbed up to camp three shortly after to investigate we discovered the debris from a massive avalanche and found many climbers in distress,” Madison wrote on the Alpine Ascents blog.

“During the rescue and recovery in the following hours we were able to coordinate and assist evacuating over a dozen climbers on 10 helicopter flights from just below camp three.”

Manaslu is nicknamed “Killer Mountain” by locals because a series of snowslides have claimed the lives of scores of mountaineers since it was first conquered in 1956.

The latest deaths mean at least 62 people have died, according to an AFP tally.

It saw its worst disaster when a South Korean expedition was buried by snow while attempting to climb the northeast face in 1972. The 15 dead included 10 Sherpas and the Korean expedition leader.

Three still missing after deadly Nepal avalanche: policeKathmandu (AFP) Sept 24, 2012 – Two French climbers and a Canadian were still missing Monday, police said, after an avalanche killed at least nine people ahead of an attempt on one of the world’s highest mountains.”We have now stopped helicopter rescue operations. Two French and a Canadian mountaineer are still missing. Sherpa guides are in the mountains searching for them,” said district police chief Basanta Bahadur Kunwar.Nepal’s tourism board had earlier put the missing figure at seven, but police said four of those were among 13 already rescued on Sunday.Kunwar said five mountaineers had been airlifted from among the survivors at Manaslu base camp Sunday and were being treated in Kathmandu.

“The other eight mountaineers who are at the base camp have not sustained any injuries. They have said they will either walk down or will make an attempt to reach the peak again and have told officials that they should not be rescued.”

Rescuers scaled down a search Monday for two French climbers and a Canadian missing in a Nepal avalanche which killed at least nine people attempting to scale one of the world’s highest peaks.

Police said they had halted a helicopter rescue mission as hopes faded for the trio, part of a group hit by a wall of snow in their tents near the peak of the 8,156-metre (26,759-foot) Manaslu in the early hours of Sunday.

“We have now stopped helicopter rescue operations. Two French and a Canadian mountaineer are still missing. Sherpa guides are in the mountains searching for them,” district police chief Basanta Bahadur Kunwar told AFP.

Nepal’s tourism board had earlier put the missing figure at seven, but police said four of those were among 13 already rescued on Sunday.

Among those reported missing was a doctor from the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, cardiologist Dominique Ouimet, the man’s sister said.

“The tents seem to have disappeared because the avalanche came by,” Isabelle Ouimet told Radio Canada, adding that her brother was at camp three when the avalanche struck.

Kunwar said five mountaineers had been airlifted from among the survivors at Manaslu base camp Sunday and were being treated in Kathmandu.

“The other eight mountaineers who are at the base camp have not sustained any injuries. They have said they will either walk down or will make an attempt to reach the peak again and have told officials that they should not be rescued.”

Eight of the dead have been identified, Nepal tourism board spokesman Sarad Pradhan told AFP, adding that four were French, one a Nepali mountain guide, one a Spaniard, one German and one Italian.

Harrowing accounts of the avalanche began to emerge from survivors being treated in Kathmandu.

“We were sleeping in our tent after having dinner, when all of a sudden we heard the noise of other climbers screaming. Within moments, we were hit by the avalanche,” Andreas Reiter, 26, from Germany, was quoted as telling the Himalayan Times from his hospital bed in the capital.

“I witnessed one of the team members die.”

SNGM vice-president Christian Trommsdorff described the French victims as three mountain guides from the Chamonix area in the Alps and their clients, who were part of two expeditions.

The avalanche happened at around 7,400 metres and carried away part of camp number three at 6,800 metres, Trommsdorff told AFP.

Manaslu, the eighth-highest mountain in the world, is considered one of the most dangerous, with scores of deaths in recent years and just a few hundred successful ascents.

Laxmi Dhakal, head of the home ministry’s disaster response division, confirmed the avalanche had hit camp three and said it had created “a flood of snow”.

Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000 metres, including the world’s highest, Mount Everest, and attracts thousands of mountaineers every year.

Most come in the spring, when Himalayan conditions are at their best, but there is also a short climbing season in late September and October after the monsoon rains end.

Manaslu is nicknamed “Killer Mountain” by locals because a series of snowslides have claimed the lives of scores of mountaineers since it was first conquered in 1956. The latest deaths mean at least 62 people have died, according to an AFP tally.

It saw its worst disaster when a South Korean expedition was buried by snow while attempting to climb the northeast face in 1972. The 15 dead included 10 Sherpas and the Korean expedition leader.

Those who attempt the summit are experienced climbers who will tackle other Himalayan peaks as well, said Dawa Steven Sherpa, two-time summiteer of Everest from Kathmandu.

“People who normally climb up Manaslu have bigger peaks in mind, or they are people who are attempting to climb all the 8,000m peaks,” he told AFP.

“Very few people climb Manaslu for the sake of just climbing Manaslu.”

Nepal’s worst-ever climbing disaster happened in 1995 when a huge avalanche struck the camp of a Japanese trekking group in the Mount Everest region, killing 42 people including 13 Japanese.

Epidemic Hazards / Diseases

According to the World Health Organization, a British tourist to Qatar has been infected with an unknown virus that has damaged his kidneys and lungs. The United Nations health body, which issued a statement through its “global alert and response” system, said tests on the patient, a 49-year-old Qatari man, confirmed the presence of a new, or novel, coronavirus. The tourist was hospitalized in Qatar, but after his condition deteriorated, he was transferred to a hospital in the UK. After conducting various examinations, doctors have concluded that the tourist was infected with an unknown virus thought to have mutated from the coronavirus, known to be the cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Biohazard name:

SARS like symptomes

Biohazard level:

4/4 Hazardous

Biohazard desc.:

Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.

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A new respiratory illness similar to the Sars virus that spread globally in 2003 and killed hundreds of people has been identified in a man who is being treated in Britain.

The 49-year-old man, who was transferred to a London hospital by air ambulance from Qatar, is the second person confirmed with the coronavirus.

The first case was a patient in Saudi Arabia who has since died.

Officials are still determining what threat the new virus may pose.

The World Health Organization has not recommended any travel restrictions.

Sars was very quick off the mark infecting hospital staff etc and this new virus does not to me appear to be in the same ‘big bang’ group”

Prof John Oxford A virology expert at Queen Mary, University of London

Prof John Watson, head of the respiratory diseases department at the UK’s Health Protection Agency, said: “In the light of the severity of the illness that has been identified in the two confirmed cases, immediate steps have been taken to ensure that people who have been in contact with the UK case have not been infected, and there is no evidence to suggest that they have.

“Further information about these cases is being developed for healthcare workers in the UK, as well as advice to help maintain increased vigilance for this virus.”

He said there was no specific evidence of the virus spreading from person to person and he had no advice for the public or returning travellers.

Peter Openshaw, director of the Centre for Respiratory Infection at Imperial College London, told Reuters that at this stage the novel virus looked unlikely to prove a concern, and may well only have been identified due to sophisticated testing techniques.

And Prof John Oxford, a virology expert at Queen Mary, University of London, said he felt “somewhat relaxed” about the news.

“Sars was very quick off the mark infecting hospital staff etc and this new virus does not to me appear to be in the same ‘big bang’ group.”

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses which includes ones that cause the common cold and Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome).

This new virus is different from any coronaviruses that have previously been identified in humans.

There have been a small number of other cases of serious respiratory illness in the Middle East in the past three months, one of whom was treated in the UK but has since died.

This person’s illness is also being investigated, although there is no evidence as yet to suggest that it is caused by the same virus or linked to the current case. No other confirmed cases have been identified to date in the UK.

Sars is a serious respiratory infection that caused a global outbreak in 2002, spreading from Hong Kong to more than 30 different countries around the world and killing around 800 people. Although it has not been eradicated its spread was fully contained in 2003. Like other coronaviruses, it is spread through droplets of body fluids – produced by sneezing and coughing.

Over 200 cases of Cholera have been recorded within two weeks in the Greater Accra region, raising concerns about the sanitation situation in the regionâs busy centres. Health officials say they are marveled by the increase in the figures and say they intend intensifying their sensitization programmes. Last week, there reports of an outbreak of the disease in parts of the Upper East Region following the floods in the area. The Disease Control Officer at the regional Ghana Health Service unit, Ato Ashong told XYZ News something drastic measures will have to be taken to reverse the trend. According to Mr Ashong, the cases have shot up from double figures to more than two hundred cases in the last few days. He said the unit is not certain about what might have caused the sudden upsurge in the disease but assured that it will be liaising with health centres across the region to handle the cases.

An elementary school aged student at the Mountain Laurel Waldorf School in New Paltz has come down with a case of the measles. âItâs significant because about 30 percent of people who get measles can suffer serious complications and there is a fatality rate associated with measles,â said Dutchess County Director of Communicable Diseases, Linda Squires. Officials said a number of students at the school were not vaccinated and are now at risk of becoming ill. Measles is a highly contagious virus that could easily be spread by simply breathing in the same air as someone who has the illness. âWhatâs interesting about measles is that someone is in a room and has left, for two hours after that time, that air is still able to transmit measles to other persons in that area,â Squires explained. Ulster and Dutchess County health officials are advising anyone who may have visited the school since September 10 to ensure they are up to date with their vaccinations. âItâs recommended that people get that after the age of 12 months and then again between the ages of 4-6, and it should provide lifelong immunity,â Squires added. Children, pregnant women, and people with pre-existing medical conditions are at a higher risk of having serious complications after contracting the virus. Symptoms include fever, red watery eyes, runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. Some children also can get an ear infection and fewer numbers can develop pneumonia as a result.

Climate Change

MessageToEagle.com – Climate scientists warn that the rapid and extensive Arctic sea ice melt due to global warming, may cause extreme weather this winter in North America and Europe. A few months ago, researchers from the University of Reading announced that Europe’s future climate will bring violent Winter storms.

Now, climate scientist Jennifer Francis, a researcher at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University said that “shrinking Arctic ice can be tied to such recent weather events as prolonged cold spells in Europe, heavy snows in the Northeastern U.S. and Alaska, and heat waves in Russia.”

Previously scientists predicted that it would take 30 or 40 more years before the Arctic was ice-free in the summer, Los Angeles Times reports.

However, since 2005 the rate of summer melt increased enormously and today scientists say Arctic ice covers about 1 million square miles

“I think that what we can expect in the next few years is further collapse leading to an ice-free Arctic in summer. It really is a dramatic change,” said Peter Wadhams, an ocean physics professor at the University of Cambridge

“The loss of Arctic ice has several effects. Ice reflects heat and solar energy back into space.With less ice cover, that heat energy is instead absorbed by the ocean, which warms and melts more ice.Currently, the Arctic region is the fastest-warming region on the planet, and the change in temperature will probably influence weather patterns here and in Europe, according to Francis.

The heating and cooling of Arctic seawater has been affecting the jet stream — the river of air that flows from west to east high above the Earth’s surface — and has slowed it down, Francis said.

The jet stream controls the formation and movement of storm systems, so when its movement slows, weather conditions persist for longer periods of time over the same area. They get “stuck.”

“If you’re in a nice dry pattern with sunny skies, it’s great if it lasts for a few days. But If it lasts for a few weeks, well then you’re starting to talk about a drought,” Francis said. “If you have a rainy pattern and it hangs around for a long time, then that becomes a situation that could lead to flooding.”

Arctic warming will influence weather to the south during the late fall and winter. While Francis said it would probably result in severe weather this winter, it was impossible to predict when and where those events would occur.

Record ice melts this year and in 2007 have alarmed many scientists, mostly because they thought it would take many more years to reach this state.

James Overland, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said forecasts failed to account for the physics of lost solar energy reflection and warming ocean water.

“These are really surprises to most scientists,” Overland said. “In looking at climate models that are used to look forward, they’ve tended to say the Arctic may be ice-free by 2040 or 2050. It looks like things are happening a lot faster, and it’s because not all of the physics that we’re seeing today were well-handled in these climate models.”

Overland, who is also an associate professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, said these effects are known as “Arctic amplification” and would carry heavy consequences for wildlife like polar bears and walruses by reducing their habitat. The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean dropped below the previous all-time record set in 2007. This year also marks the first time that there has been less than 4 million square kilometers (1.54 million square miles) of sea ice since satellite observations began in 1979. This animation shows the 2012 time-series of ice extent using sea ice concentration data from the DMSP SSMI/S satellite sensor. The black area represents the daily average (median) sea ice extent over the 1979-2000 time period. Layered over top of that are the daily satellite measurements from January 1 — September 14, 2012. A rapid melt begins in July, whereby the 2012 ice extents fall far below the historical average

The frozen cap of the Arctic Ocean appears to have reached its annual summertime minimum extent and broken a new record low on Sept. 16, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has reported. Analysis of satellite data by NASA and the NASA-supported NSIDC at the University of Colorado in Boulder showed that the sea ice extent shrunk to 1.32 million square miles (3.41 million square kilometers).

The new record minimum measures almost 300,000 square miles less than the previous lowest extent in the satellite record, set in mid-September 2007, of 1.61 million square miles (4.17 million square kilometers). For comparison, the state of Texas measures around 268,600 square miles.

NSIDC cautioned that, although Sept. 16 seems to be the annual minimum, there’s still time for winds to change and compact the ice floes, potentially reducing the sea ice extent further. NASA and NSIDC will release a complete analysis of the 2012 melt season next month, once all data for September are available.

Satellite data reveal how the new record low Arctic sea ice extent, from Sept. 16, 2012, compares to the average minimum extent over the past 30 years (in yellow). Sea ice extent maps are derived from data captured by the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer aboard NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite and the Special Sensor Microwave Imager on multiple satellites from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio

Arctic sea ice cover naturally grows during the dark Arctic winters and retreats when the sun re-appears in the spring. But the sea ice minimum summertime extent, which is normally reached in September, has been decreasing over the last three decades as Arctic ocean and air temperatures have increased. This year’s minimum extent is approximately half the size of the average extent from 1979 to 2000. This year’s minimum extent also marks the first time Arctic sea ice has dipped below 4 million square kilometers.

“Climate models have predicted a retreat of the Arctic sea ice; but the actual retreat has proven to be much more rapid than the predictions,” said Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “There continues to be considerable inter-annual variability in the sea ice cover, but the long-term retreat is quite apparent.”

The thickness of the ice cover is also in decline.

“The core of the ice cap is the perennial ice, which normally survived the summer because it was so thick”, said Joey Comiso, senior scientist with NASA Goddard. “But because it’s been thinning year after year, it has now become vulnerable to melt”.

The disappearing older ice gets replaced in winter with thinner seasonal ice that usually melts completely in the summer.

MessageToEagle.com – Will Nunavut that extends to the North Pole and includes most of Canada’s Arctic islands be soon green again?

It’s one of the most remote and sparsely settled regions in the world. It has a population of only 31,906 mostly Inuit, spread over an area the size of Western Europe.

Global climate change means that recently discovered ancient forests in Canada’s extreme north could one day return, according to Alexandre Guertin-Pasquier of the University of Montreal’s Department of Geography, who is presenting his findings at the Canadian Paleontology Conference in Toronto.

Until 1999, Nunavut was part of the Northwest Territories“According to the data model, climate conditions on Bylot Island will be able to support the kinds of trees we find in the fossilized forest that currently exist there, such as willow, pine and spruce.

Iqaluit is the territorial capital and the largest community of the Canadian territory of NunavutI’ve also found evidence of a possible growth of oak and hickory near the study site during this period.,” Guertin-Pasquier said.

“Although it would of course take time for a whole forest to regrow, the findings show that our grandchildren should be able to plant a tree and watch it grow.”

The fossilized forest found on Bylot Island in Nunavut is between 2.6 and 3 million years old according to estimations based on the presence of extinct species and on paleomagnetic analyses. Paleomagentic analysis involves looking at how the Earth’s magnetic field has affected the magnetic sediment in rocks – like a compass, they turn to follow the magnetic poles.

Click on image to enlarge
Scientists can use this information to date rocks as the history of the movement of the magnetic poles is relatively well known.

Wood samples in the ancient forest have been preserved throughout the eons in peat and by permafrost.

“We studied the sediments in the forest and discovered pollen that are usually found in climates where the annual average temperature is around 0 degrees Celsius or 32 Fahrenheit,” Guertin-Pasquier said.

Click on image to enlarge
By comparison, current average conditions on Bylot Island are around -15°C ( 5°F). The samples were taken from few drill holes 10 cm in diameter of one to two metres deep. The harshness of the Arctic winter and the remoteness of the forest mean that scientists have very little opportunity to delve into its secrets.

Click on image to enlarge
Even during the summer, the Guertin-Pasquier and his colleagues had to endure extreme conditions such as 80 km/h winds.

“There is so much mystery that surrounds this forest – for example, how these trees managed to survive the relentless dark of the Arctic winter,” he said, adding that the next steps for this line of research could include looking more closely at other plant remains in order to get a better understanding of what the local flora was.MessageToEagle.com.

Sometimes, these cavities have areas of bright X-ray emission in their centers.

Now, NASA scientists focus on this mysterious phenomenon because it seems to be strongly related to dangerous coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
And CMEs, scientists have to worry about.

Click on image to enlargeThe faint oval hovering above the upper left limb of the sun in this picture is known as a coronal cavity. NASA’s Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) captured this image on Aug. 9, 2007. A team of scientists extensively studied this particular cavity in order to understand more about the structure and magnetic fields in the sun’s atmosphere. Credit: NASA/STEREO
The Sun’s abnormal behavior is a cause for concern even we all know that activity near the Sun’s surface rises and falls through an 11-year cycle that is due to peak in 2013 or 2014.

The cavity as it appeared on the west limb on 2008 July 21. The location of the cavity is indicated by a box. Source
Scientists want to better understand the complexity of solar activity and its dangerous events. It’s crucial to find a way to predict them and minimize the damage they might cause.

“We don’t really know what gets these CMEs going,” says Terry Kucera, a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “So we want to understand their structure before they even erupt, because then we might have a better clue about why it’s erupting and perhaps even get some advance warning on when they will erupt.”

A team of researchers used NASA data to study a precursor of CMEs called coronal cavities – a larger formation, appearing from the side almost as the filament inside a large light bulb.

The bright structure around and above that light bulb is called a streamer, and the inside “empty” area is called a coronal prominence cavity.

According to scientists, the cavity is in the shape of a croissant, with a giant inner tube of looping magnetic fields.

The cavity appears to be 30% less dense than the streamer surrounding it, and the temperatures vary greatly throughout the cavity, but on average range from 1.4 million to 1.7 million Celsius (2.5 to 3 million Fahrenheit), increasing with height.

Of course, to describe a cavity, a space that appears empty from our viewpoint, from 93 million miles away – is not any easy task for scientists.

Click on image to enlargeThe evolution of the part of the cavity over several days – visible from Earth, July 2008. Source
The Aug. 9, 2012 cavity lay at a fortuitous angle that maximized observations of the cavity itself, as opposed to the prominence at its base or the surrounding plasma.

“Our point with all of these research projects into what might seem like side streets, is ultimately to figure out the physics of magnetic fields in the corona,” says Sarah Gibson, a solar scientist at the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.
Gibson is also an author on all three cavity papers.

“Sometimes these cavities can be stable for days and weeks, but then suddenly erupt into a CME. We want to understand how that happens.”

We’re accessing so much data, so it’s an exciting time – with all these observations, our understanding is coming together to form a consistent story.”
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Volcanic Activity

JAKARTA, Indonesia – A volcano in northern Indonesia has spewed hot smoke and ash thousands of feet into the air in two new eruptions.

Mount Lokon on Sulawesi island had been dormant before rumbling back to life last year.

Government volcanologist Hendrasto says it unleashed two strong eruptions Friday.

Residents have been put on alert, but no evacuations are planned since the nearest villages are beyond the danger area about 2.5 kilometres (1.5 miles) from the crater.

Mount Lokon’s last major eruption in 1991 killed a Swiss hiker and forced thousands to flee. The volcano is one of five on high alert in Indonesia. The archipelago straddles the “Pacific Ring of Fire” and has more active volcanoes than any other nation.

Niamey, Niger – At least 92 people have died in floods that have swept Niger following torrential rains, according to the latest data released by the Prime minister’s office on Friday. The data indicate that 72,396 families are affected with 511,484 people being victims, as at Thursday. All the country’s eight regions are affected by floods with Tillabéry, Dosso and Niamey being the worst affected. Huge damage is reported on basic socio-economic infrastructure and other items crucial to the people.

Rice crops, schools, health centres, roads, bridges, dams have all been affected while a huge quantities of food and many cattle have been swept away by flood waters.

The chairperson of the technical committee in charge of managing the floods, Mrs Saadatou Malam Barmou, said that thanks to national solidarity and international cooperation, food needs are covered for 45 days out.

Water containers have been distributed to victims to fetch potable water to reduce water-related diseases. The ministry of Health has also set up health centres at the sites and mobile teams to solve health problems.

The government has made available 3,400 tonnes of cereals for the victims and raised 700 million CFAF to support re-housing and buy additional food.

Jeremy Zidek, spokesman for the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, says in a release that there have been reports of flooding, landslides and road closures throughout the area.

But there has been no report of major injuries.

Residents in East Talkeetna are being told to evacuate because of flooding.

The Red Cross has established three shelters in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and helped with another in Seward.

Weather problems are not confined to Southcentral Alaska.

Zidek says a landslide has blocked access from the village of Chenega to its airport, and state transportation officials are working to restore access. And an assessment team is in Tanacross to evaluate damage from Sunday’s wind storm.

Cameroon authorities have found six more bodies in flood waters, bringing the number killed to as high as 40 in the wake of tropical downpours and the breaching of a dam in the west African country. The inundation in the Far North Region has affected more than 26,000, officials said Thursday, and in neighboring Nigeria at least 15 deaths are blamed on waters rushing into the country from Cameroon’s compromised Lagdo Dam on the Benoue River. Cameroon’s Communication Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary has described the flooding as “a calamity” and called for urgent action to save lives and property. Local officials are calling it the worst flood disaster in over 60 years. Water has submerged swaths of the North Region downstream, wiping out homes, farms and livestock, and Cameroon’s government has dispatched a military contingency to assist and evacuate victims.

Residents of Talkeetna are being asked to evacuate the town after its dike system against heavy flooding failed Friday, according to local firefighters. The evacuation is now voluntary, although an initial order was mandatory. Talkeetna Fire Department Battalion Chief Johnny Murdoch, the incident commander for flooding in the area, says the Susitna River started backing up to the Talkeetna River, causing the dike to fail. According to local officials the decision to evacuate Talkeetna was made by Alaska State Troopers, with authorities expecting water to continue rising Friday afternoon. The Associated Press reports that overnight rains in Talkeetna ranged from half an inch to 1 1/2 inches over a 6- to 8-hour period. The Talkeetna River was within a foot of its record stage of 17.4 feet, with officials telling the AP about 35 percent of Talkeetna has some form of water coverage. Students from Talkeetna’s elementary school were being bused to the local high school Friday. Traffic was blocked from entering Talkeetna until the evacuation was no longer mandatory, a change made shortly before 2 p.m. In a flood warning effective through 10 p.m. Friday, the National Weather Service says a levee protecting the town was breached as of 1 p.m. The Talkeetna River is 4 feet above flood stage, and expected to crest Friday evening. âAll persons in the vicinity of Talkeetna should take precautions now to protect life and property,â meteorologists wrote. The NWS advises people to avoid crossing flowing streams — even small ones â on foot, or driving across flooded roadways in cars, under the slogan âTurn around, donât drown.â

Radiation / Nuclear

The tsunami in Japan in March 2011 unleashed a series of negligence related with the resulting nuclear disaster. A scientific study headed by Spanish researchers has for the first time identified those atomic power plants that are more prone to suffering the effects of a tsunami. In total, 23 plants are in dangerous areas, including Fukushima I, with 74 reactors located in the east and southeast of Asia.

Tsunamis are synonymous with the destruction of cities and homes and since the Japanese coast was devastated in March 2011 we now know that they cause nuclear disaster, endanger the safety of the population and pollute the environment. As such phenomena are still difficult to predict, a team of scientists have assessed “potentially dangerous” areas that are home to completed nuclear plants or those under construction. In the study published in the ‘Natural Hazards’ journal, the researchers drew a map of the world’s geographic zones that are more at risk of large tsunamis. Based on this data, 23 nuclear power plants with 74 reactors have been identified in high risk areas. One of them includes Fukushima I. Out of them, 13 plants with 29 reactors are active; another four, that now have 20 reactors, are being expanded to house nine more; and there are seven new plants under construction with 16 reactors. “We are dealing with the first vision of the global distribution of civil nuclear power plants situated on the coast and exposed to tsunamis,” as explained to SINC by José Manuel Rodríguez-Llanes, coauthor of the study and researcher at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. The authors used historical, archaeological, geological and instrumental records as a base for determining tsunami risk. Despite the fact that the risk of these natural disasters threatens practically the entire western coast of the American continent, the Spanish/Portuguese Atlantic Coast and the coast of North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and areas of Oceania, especially in South and Southeast Asia are at greater risk due to the presence of atomic power stations.

23 nuclear power plants are in tsunami risk areas Credit: SINC For Debarati Guha-Sapir, another coauthor of the study and CRED researcher, “the impact of natural disaster is getting worse due to the growing interaction with technological installations.” China: a nuclear power in the making Some 27 out of 64 nuclear reactors that are currently under construction in the world are found in China. This is an example of the massive nuclear investment of the Asian giant. “The most important fact is that 19 (two of which are in Taiwan) out of the 27 reactors are being built in areas identified as dangerous,” state the authors of the study. In the case of Japan, which in March 2011 suffered the consequences of the worse tsunami in its history, there are seven plants with 19 reactors at risk, one of which is currently under construction. South Korea is now expanding two plants at risk with five reactors. India (two reactors) and Pakistan (one reactor) could also feel the consequences of a tsunami in the plants. The ghost of Fukushima “The location of nuclear installations does not only have implications for their host countries but also for the areas which could be affected by radioactive leaks,” as outlined to SINC by Joaquín Rodríguez-Vidal, lead author of the study and researcher at the Geodynamics and Paleontology Department of the University of Huelva. According to the study, we should learn our lessons from the Fukushima accident. For the authors, prevention and previous scientific studies are the best tools for avoiding such disasters. “But since the tsunami in 2004 the Indian Ocean region is still to take effective political measures,” warn the researchers. The Fukushima crisis took place in a highly developed country with one of the highest standards in scientific knowledge and technological infrastructure. “If it had occurred in a country less equipped for dealing with the consequences of catastrophe, the impact would have been a lot more serious for the world at large,” claim the experts. Therefore, Professor Rodríguez-Vidal recommends the drafting of more local analyses that consider the seismic amplification of each nuclear power plant and determine the adaptation of installation identified in the study. More information: Rodríguez-Vidal, Joaquin ; Rodríguez-Llanes, Jose M. ; Guha-Sapir, Debarati. “Civil nuclear power at risk of tsunamis “

Japan Backpedals on “No Nukes” Policy

Last week, Japan surprised the world by announcing that it plans to abandon atomic energy completely by the 2030s. But now in an abrupt turnaround, the Japanese Cabinet appears to be backpedaling on that decision, dropping any mention of the 2030s deadline in its approval of Japan’s new energy policy.

Epidemic Hazards / Diseases

PRISTINA, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) – At least five people in the Balkans have died from West Nile virus and several dozen others have been hospitalized in the past four weeks, according to health authorities in Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Croatia.

West Nile virus is a mosquito-borne disease usually found in temperate and tropical regions. While many cases are mild and have no symptoms, severe disease symptoms can include headaches, high fever, neck stiffness, coma, tremors, convulsions, muscle weakness and paralysis.

Kosovo confirmed its first fatality on Wednesday, saying the victim was a woman from central Kosovo who died on Sept 14. Macedonia’s health officials said on Thursday one woman had died and two other people were infected with the virus.

A spokesman for the Kosovo Health Ministry told Reuters on Thursday two other people who died recently were also suspected of having the same virus, but the cases had not been confirmed with laboratory blood tests.

The United States is currently experiencing one of its worst outbreaks of West Nile virus since 2003.

In Serbia, three people have died and 35 were hospitalized since mid-August.

“This is the first time the West Nile virus has been officially registered in Serbia,” the country’s Department for Public Health said in a statement.

All the infected people were over 50 and had other chronic diseases, it said. Serbia’s western neighbor Croatia has registered five probable cases of the virus but no deaths.

Measles epidemic Congo – An outbreak of measles, which has been raging in Likouala, North-eastern Congo since April, has already killed 22 people, the state-run radio said Friday.

The epidemic, which initially hit Liranga and Bétou, have now reached Impfondo and Epena.

Following the outbreak, the Ministry of Health Thursday launched a 5-day vaccination campaign against measles in the district.

Vaccination teams will travel throughout the localities of Likouala, which since 2009 has sheltered over 100,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), who are fleeing inter-ethnic violence in the Equateur province.

– In light of confirmation of a measles case in a school-aged child in Ulster County, State Health Commissioner Nirav R. Shah, M.D., M.P.H., advises all New Yorkers to be vaccinated against measles. “Many people think measles is a childhood disease of the past, but it remains a highly-contagious viral disease that can cause serious health problems and even death,” Shah said. “The good news is that measles is preventable, and people who are vaccinated can protect themselves against the disease.” The current Ulster County measles case involves a child who attends a school where nearly half of the students are not vaccinated against measles. Although vaccination against measles is one of the required immunizations for school children in New York, exemptions from the requirement may be granted by a school. The Ulster County Health Department is working with the school district to protect other school children from measles. Unvaccinated children who attend the same Ulster County school as the child with measles and unvaccinated school staff are being excluded from the school for 21 days to help prevent them from contracting or spreading the disease. Individuals are not at risk of contracting measles if they are immune. A person is considered immune if they were born before January 1, 1957, have a history of physician-diagnosed measles, a blood test confirming immunity, or have received two doses of the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine. Measles is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by a virus and is spread by direct contact with nasal or throat secretions of infected people. Due to widespread immunization in the United States, the measles virus does not circulate in this country, but is present in some foreign countries, including some in Europe and Asia. It is strongly recommended that anyone traveling to a country where measles is circulating be immunized before their trip; those who are not immunized could potentially contract the disease while abroad and infect other non-immunized individuals upon their return back to the U.S.

Biohazard name:

Measles

Biohazard level:

2/4 Medium

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.

The international humanitarian agency Oxfam is warning that living conditions of refugees in a camp in Upper Nile state are becoming increasingly desperate, and more people will probably die if help does not arrive soon. More than 100,000 refugees have fled fighting between Sudanese armed forces and rebels in Sudan’s Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan states. At least 16 refugees have died in the past two weeks from an outbreak of Hepatitis E, according to the U.N. Pauline Ballaman, Oxfam’s South Sudan director, said the best way to curb the spread of the water-borne disease is to relocate thousands of Sudanese refugees to a safer place. “The government of South Sudan and UNHCR, who are the lead agencies, would encourage them to look at all other possibilities because this is not going to be a sustainable job or solution,” Ballaman said. South Sudan and the UN refugee agency considered relocating the refugees to areas along the Nile River, according to Ballaman, but she said no decision has been made so far. Ballaman said more people are showing symptoms of Hepatitis E. She added, “there are a lot more people affected and, of course, it is far more serious for the nursing and pregnant mothers and young children, and malnutrition kicks in as well,” According to Ballaman, no season is favorable to housing more than 100,000 refugees. Widespread flooding during South Sudan’s rainy season is the problem right now, but when the dry season arrives the problem will be not enough water.

Biohazard name:

Hepatitis E. Outbreak

Biohazard level:

2/4 Medium

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.

A case of measles has been confirmed in a student who attends the Mountain Laurel Waldorf School in New Paltz, according to the Dutchess County Department of Health. The measles case was reported by Dutchess County Health Commissioner Dr. Michael Caldwell in a press release emailed to local media outlets late Friday. It was not immediately clear why the release came from a Dutchess County official rather than one in Ulster County, where the private school is located, and the name and hometown of the infected person were not provided. Caldwell said his office has “been in close communication” with the Ulster County Department of Health and the state Department of Health. Caldwell said anyone who has visited the school since Sept. 10 or has had contact with anyone from the school since that date should make sure their measles vaccinations are up to date. Those who lack proper vaccinations should consult with a doctor. Caldwell said his department has learned that a number of students at the New Paltz school have not been vaccinated for measles, meaning they could become ill and put others at risk. Caldwell said all medical practices and laboratories in the area should be on high alert that there may be a number of children and family members who have been exposed and could spread the disease further. Incidents of measles, which is highly contagious, have increased in the United States recently due to a growing number of unvaccinated individuals who travel to countries where measles is prevalent, Caldwell said.

Biohazard name:

Measles

Biohazard level:

2/4 Medium

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.

Space

A massive fireball was seen right across Ireland last night which may be “one of the best ever seen” in Europe and was a “huge event”, according to Astronomy Ireland. The trail of fragments passed across the sky at about 10.55pm with sightings reported from Dublin, Donegal, Cork, Sligo, Carlow, Longford, Antrim and across Britain and as far away as as The Netherlands. It was “very unusual to see it in multiple countries,” David Moore of Astronomy Ireland said. “I’ve never seen one fragmented like that and streaked across the sky,” he said. The fireball later exploded into fragments. Mr Moore said the cause of the fireball was not yet clear. “It is a piece of space debris, but whether it is man made or natural is not known,” he said. He said it was too slow for natural debris and was going the wrong direction for man-made debris. “It is probably a space rock that has skidded across the atmosphere.” Meteorites will have been dropped “but whether they landed in Ireland or at sea we will have to figure out”, he said. Witnesses described a trail of seven to 12 fireballs in a straight line across the sky. No sound was to be heard either by witnesses in the city or the countryside. Kielder Observatory in Britain last night reported a sighting of a “huge fireball” .Mr Moore asked for witnesses to submit a fireball report to the Astronomy Ireland website “This will help us to triangulate the path,” he said. Twitter and Facebook filled with reports of the strange sightings last night, with meteor trending on Twitter in Ireland. “Spotted what looked like about eight fireballs travelling east to west over the M1 at Santry, Dublin at 10.56pm. Amazing,” wrote one tweeter last night. The Irish Coast Guard had reports from the north coast right down the east coast.

A suspected meteorite shower over Scotland has prompted a flurry of 999 calls from worried members of the public. Concerned callers from Airdrie to Arbroath likened the lights they saw in the sky to flares, fireworks and even a plane crash. Coastguard and police forces up and down the country were inundated with reports from around 11pm on Friday night. A spokesman for Forth Coastguard said: “From talking to other stations and to the RAF it’s almost certainly meteorite activity. “Calls came in from all over the place, thick and fast. We’ve had people report possible plane crashes, and others the weirdest fireworks they’ve ever seen. “Folk just haven’t known how to describe what they’ve seen. It’s quite extraordinary.” The spokesman said reports had come from Crail, Johnshaven and Arbroath. Clyde Coastguard said it had received a “flurry” of calls reporting flares seen in Drummore, Airdrie and Brodick on Arran. A spokeswoman said: “When we get it all over and at the same time then we attribute them to meteorites. There was meteorite activity forecast from September 15 to 21.” Shetland Coastguard said a report of a flare at 11.10pm at Duncansby Head near John O’Groats was thought to be part of the meteorite shower.

MessageToEagle.com – Beautiful and mysterious structures known as superbubbles result from the stellar winds and supernovae of OB [spectral types O or early-type B] associations.

Astronomers believe they play play a fundamental role in the structure and energetics of the ISM [interstellar medium] in star-forming galaxies.

Their influence may also dominate the relationship between the different interstellar gas phases.

How do superbubbles form and evolve?
How do they affect the local and global ISM?

The Magellanic Clouds provide a superior opportunity to study this shell-forming activity, since both stellar content and gaseous structure can be examined in detail.

A superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) was observed by astronomers using Chandra X-ray Observatory.

LMC is a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located about 160,000 light years from Earth.

Many new stars, some of them very massive, are forming in the star cluster NGC 1929, which is embedded in the nebula N44.

The massive stars produce intense radiation, expel matter at high speeds, and race through their evolution to explode as supernovas.

The winds and supernova shock waves carve out huge cavities called superbubbles in the surrounding gas. X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue) show hot regions created by these winds and shocks, while infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (red) outline where the dust and cooler gas are found.

The optical light from the 2.2m Max-Planck-ESO telescope (yellow) in Chile shows where ultraviolet radiation from hot, young stars is causing gas in the nebula to glow.

A long-running problem in high-energy astrophysics has been that some superbubbles in the LMC, including N44, give off a lot more X-rays than expected from models of their structure.

A Chandra study published in 2011 showed that there are two extra sources of the bright X-ray emission: supernova shock waves striking the walls of the cavities, and hot material evaporating from the cavity walls.

The observations show no evidence for an enhancement of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the cavities, thus ruling out this possibility as an explanation for the bright X-ray emission.

Click on image to enlarge

NGC 1929 is a star cluster embedded in the N44 nebula, which is found in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Massive stars in the cluster produce intense radiation, expel matter at high speeds, and explode relatively quickly as supernovas.
Winds from the massive stars and shocks from the supernovas carve out “superbubbles” in the gas seen in X-rays by Chandra (blue). Infrared data show dust (red) and cooler gas and optical light (yellow) reveals where ultraviolet radiation is causing the gas to glow. Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/U.Mich./S.Oey, IR: NASA/JPL, Optical: ESO/WFI/2.2-m
This is the first time that the data have been good enough to distinguish between different sources of the X-rays produced by superbubbles.

The Chandra study of N44 and another superbubble in the LMC was led by Anne Jaskot from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The co-authors were Dave Strickland from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, Sally Oey from University of Michigan, You-Hua Chu from University of Illinois and Guillermo Garcia-Segura from Instituto de Astronomia-UNAM in Ensenada, Mexico.

MessageToEagle.com – Cassini spacecraft has taken great photos of Saturn and its largest moon, Titan.

The colors are spectacular and on one of the images you can even see the changing hues of Saturn’s northern and southern hemispheres as they pass from one season to the next.

Upon Cassini’s arrival at Saturn eight years ago, Saturn’s northern winter hemisphere was an azure blue.

Now that winter is encroaching on the planet’s southern hemisphere and summer on the north, the color scheme is reversing: blue is tinting the southern atmosphere and is fading from the north.

Some of these views, such as those of the polar vortex, are only possible because Cassini’s newly inclined — or tilted — orbits allow more direct viewing of the polar regions of Saturn and its moons.

Click on image to enlargeColorful Colossi and Changing Hues

A giant of a moon appears before a giant of a planet undergoing seasonal changes in this natural color view of Titan and Saturn from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, measures 3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers, across and is larger than the planet Mercury. Cassini scientists have been watching the moon’s south pole since a vortex appeared in its atmosphere in 2012.

As the seasons have changed in the Saturnian system, and spring has come to the north and autumn to the south, the azure blue in the northern Saturnian hemisphere that greeted Cassini upon its arrival in 2004 is now fading. The southern hemisphere, in its approach to winter, is taking on a bluish hue. This change is likely due to the reduced intensity of ultraviolet light and the haze it produces in the hemisphere approaching winter, and the increasing intensity of ultraviolet light and haze production in the hemisphere approaching summer. Image credit: NASA

Scientists are looking forward to seeing more of the same — new phenomena like Titan’s south polar vortex and changes wrought by the passage of time and seasons — during the remainder of Cassini’s mission.

“Cassini has been in orbit now for the last eight years, and despite the fact that we can’t know exactly what the next five years will show us, we can be certain that whatever it is will be wondrous,” said Carolyn Porco, imaging team lead based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.“It is so fantastic to experience, through the instruments of Cassini, seasonal changes in the Saturn system,” said Amanda Hendrix, deputy project scientist, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“Some of the changes we see in the data are completely unexpected, while some occur like clockwork on a seasonal timescale.

It’s an exciting time to be at Saturn.”

Click on image to enlargeObscured by Rings

Saturn’s rings obscure part of Titan’s colorful visage in this image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The south polar vortex that first appeared in Titan’s atmosphere in 2012 is visible at the bottom of this view. Image credit: NASA

Click on image to enlargeA Ring of Color

Titan’s north polar hood can be seen at the top of this view, and a hint of the south polar vortex can be detected at the bottom. Image credit: NASA

Click on image to enlargePolar Vortex in Color

The recently formed south polar vortex stands out in the color-swaddled atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in this natural color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The south polar vortex can be seen approximately centered over the south pole in the lower left of the image. Image credit: NASA

IU/YSS, Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, Russia

Volcanic Activity

Roughly 1,100 years ago, the Changbaishan volcano that lies along the border between northeastern China and North Korea erupted, sending pyroclastic flows dozens of kilometers and blasting a 5-kilometer (3-mile) wide chunk off of the tip of the stratovolcano.

The eruption, known as the Millennium eruption because of its proximity to the turn of the first millennium, was one of the largest volcanic events in the Common Era. In the subsequent period, there have been three smaller eruptions, the most recent of which took place in 1903. Starting in 1999, spurred by signs of resumed activity, scientists established the Changbaishan Volcano Observatory, a network to track changing gas compositions, seismic activity, and ground deformation. Reporting on the data collected over the past 12 years, Xu et al. find that these volcanic indices each leapt during a period of heightened activity from 2002 to 2006. The authors find that during this brief active period, earthquake occurrences increased dramatically. From 1999 to 2002, and from 2006 to 2011, they registered 7 earthquakes per month using 11 seismometers. From 2002 to 2006, this rate increased to 72 earthquakes per month, peaking in November 2003 with 243 events. Further, tracking the source of the earthquakes, the authors tie the bulk of the events to a region located 5 kilometers (3 miles) beneath the volcanic caldera, a source that slowly crept upward throughout the study period, suggestive of an ongoing magmatic intrusion. Gas composition measurements collected from hot springs near the volcano showed spikes in carbon dioxide, hydrogen, helium, and nitrogen gases, which the authors suggest could be related to magmatic outgassing. Ground deformation studies, too, show a brief period of rapid expansion. The authors suggest that though Changbaishan is likely not gearing up for an imminent eruption, one could be expected in the next couple of decades. More information: Recent unrest of Changbaishan volcano, northeast China: A precursor of a future eruption? Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2012GL052600 , 2012